At home, Ivy and Prairie climbed the narrow stairs to their room. Prairie scrambled into the top bunk. “Did you have a good birthday?”

“It was perfect.” Pup padded in around the half-open door. Ivy fluttered her fingers at him and he leaped up beside her. She rubbed his ears and he arched his neck and purred. “Thank you for everything. I love the colored pencils.”

“You’re welcome.” Prairie flopped onto her stomach and her arm dangled over the edge of the bunk. “Finally you’re eleven too.” The arm disappeared. “Now maybe Mom will let us ride our bikes to town by ourselves. Let’s ask tomorrow.” With each sentence, Prairie’s voice grew sleepier, and then she was snoring—snoring lightly, but still snoring, no matter how much she refused to believe it.

Ivy slid the sketchbook Grammy had given her out of its gift bag. She smoothed her hand over its hard black cover and traced a finger down the big wire spiral. She opened it to the first page, paused for a moment, then started to write.

She put down everything she wanted to remember about the day: the orange cake with chocolate frosting, the presents, the boy in the Nestlé’s Quik T-shirt, the determined look of Grammy’s blue plaid sneakers making their way up the aisle. Then, for about the thousandth time since she’d started keeping a journal, Ivy wrote about how she wanted to be a movie director someday.

It was a crazy dream, but every time she saw a movie, she was filled with the desire. Writing about it used an entire page, and drawing it out with the colored pencils Prairie had given her used another. She drew herself wearing a black beret and carrying a megaphone, sitting in a director’s chair with her name on the back of it. It was silly but no one would ever see it, so it was okay.

Ivy wrote and wrote, the notebook on her knees.

• • •

She clicked off her light at nine o’clock, the bedtime Mom Evers set for them. At ten she was still awake. Sometimes her thoughts started churning like clothes in a washer and she couldn’t stop them. Mom Evers kept saying the baby she was expecting had turned her into the world’s lightest sleeper, but Ivy knew she herself was the world’s lightest sleeper, really.

Finally she got out of bed and tiptoed into the hall. She peeked into Grammy’s tiny bedroom. Empty. She crept to the middle step of the stairs and sat with her arms wrapped around her knees.

“I did enjoy that movie,” Grammy said from the kitchen.

“That was something, that train going right through the station wall,” Dad Evers said. “Imagine being there that day.” A fork clinked on a plate. He was having another piece of cake, probably. “You think she had a good birthday?”

“I really hoped her mother would at least call,” Mom Evers said. “That woman—”

Ivy tensed, but no one finished the sentence. Pup padded up beside her and she lifted him onto her lap.

Their conversation meandered into the gas mileage the station wagon might get and what time they needed to be at the other farmers’ market they went to every week, the one in Woodstock on Wednesday. Ivy listened, thinking about the changes Mom and Dad Evers were making. The new used car, big enough to fit everyone. An addition they were tacking onto the side of the house to be the baby’s room. The painted chairs as another thing to sell at the markets along with the flowers and vegetables and quilts and birdhouses, though so far there’d been more money going out on those than coming in. Dad Evers had even taken a part-time job as a mechanic, which bothered Ivy a lot.

She kept thinking if it wasn’t for her—an extra person to feed and clothe—he wouldn’t have had to. He’d only taken the job after many late-night talks at the kitchen table, talks they didn’t know she was listening to. But it had been her habit ever since she moved in to sit at the top of the stairs if she couldn’t sleep and listen to them. Their voices were always low and easy and usually it made Ivy feel like a horse at a trough of cool, clean water, drinking up their conversations.

But now, all the changes made her worry. What would happen to her when the baby came and everything was different?