Chapter 23 What He Doesn't Have a Name For Yet
JAKE POV
The teeth are too big.
Jake knows this. He knew it when he was painting them. He kept going anyway because Lily was watching with the specific expression she gets when something is exceeding her expectations, eyes wide, both hands pressed to her cheeks, barely breathing. That expression is worth a lot. That expression is worth disproportionate dinosaur teeth every single time.
"THEY'RE SO BIG," Lily screams.
"They're too big," Penny says from across the table. She is trying to sound authoritative. She is losing.
"Too big is the point."
"The point was scary. There's a size at which they stop being scary and start being."
"Magnificent," Jake says.
"I was going to say absurd."
"Same thing."
Penny puts her paintbrush down. She picks up the cardboard head and holds it at arm's length. She stares at it. One eye slightly higher than the other. Scales that go in four different directions. Teeth that are, objectively, larger than the head probably requires.
She opens her mouth to say something.
Lily snatches the head back. "They're perfect," she announces. "I want the kindergartners to have bad dreams."
Jake points at Penny. "See."
"That is not a defense," Penny says. "That is a child describing a traumatizing experience for other children."
"She said she wanted them to remember it."
"There's a spectrum between memorable and haunting."
"Penny." Jake leans forward on his elbows. "Look at her face."
Penny looks at Lily.
Lily is wearing the head. She is doing the walk. The specific walk she developed about an hour ago that involves stomping each foot with maximum weight and holding both arms bent at the wrist like the world's smallest, most enthusiastic predator.
Penny stares at her for a moment.
Her mouth does the thing. The almost-thing. The thing where she fights it.
She loses.
It starts small.
A sound she cuts off immediately. She presses her lips together. She looks at the table. Jake watches her do the whole sequence, the attempt at control, the recalibration, the second attempt that also fails, and then she just gives up. All at once. Completely.
She laughs.
Not the careful kind. Not the polite kind she uses at school or the quiet kind she uses when Lily says something funny during dinner. Not the controlled half-laugh she lets out sometimes when he says something and then seems surprised at herself for reacting.
The real one.
Her head tips back. Her shoulders shake. She grabs the counter behind her because she actually needs something to hold onto. The sound of it fills the kitchen, the whole room, and it is the most unguarded Jake has ever seen her, and it is the best sound he has heard in this house in two years.
Maybe longer.
Lily starts laughing because Penny is laughing. Lily doesn't even know what's funny anymore. She's just responding to Penny the way she always does, like a mirror, like Penny is the frequency she's tuned to. She laughs her enormous six-year-old laugh, and the dinosaur head tips sideways over one eye, and that makes Penny laugh harder.
Jake stands at the end of the table.
He doesn't laugh.
He just watches.
He watches Penny with her head back and her guard completely down and her hair falling out of whatever she had it in, and glitter on her cheek from earlier that she still hasn't noticed. He watches her laugh until she runs out of breath and has to start again. He watches Lily stomp over and grab Penny's arm and laugh into her elbow, and Penny drops a hand onto the top of Lily's ridiculous dinosaur head like it's the most natural thing.
Something shifts in his chest.
He doesn't have a name for it yet.
He goes back to washing his paintbrush.
After dinner, after the bath, after the story, which tonight is the one about the dinosaur who is afraid of the dark, which Lily has chosen deliberately and with a clear personal agenda, Jake stands at the kitchen sink washing green paint off his hands.
It doesn't come off easily.
He scrubs at the base of his fingers. The water runs faintly green. Outside the window, the backyard is dark, and the motion light keeps clicking on for no reason, probably a cat, and the heater hums, and the house is quiet the way it only gets after Lily is asleep.
He hears Penny come in behind him.
She doesn't say anything for a moment. He hears the paper towel roll spin.
He should say something. He has been standing here for three minutes already, and he hasn't landed on anything that doesn't sound like too much or not enough.
"You were right about the teeth," he says.
"I was right about the teeth," she agrees.
"Don't read into that. I'm not going to make a habit of it."
"Of being wrong or of admitting it?"
"Both."
He can hear her smiling. He doesn't turn around.
She says goodnight. He hears her footsteps go down the hall. He hears her door close, quiet and careful like everything she does.
Jake stands at the sink.
He looks at his hands. The paint is mostly off, but his knuckles are still faintly green, the lines and creases still holding color the way they do when you've really gotten into something. He used to come home from helping his mom in the garden with hands like this. She grew tomatoes in the back that never fully ripened because they didn't get enough sun, and she grew them anyway every year because she said trying was the point.
He hasn't thought about the garden in a long time.
He hasn't thought about a lot of things in a long time. Grief works like that. You stop touching certain memories because it hurts, and then they go quiet, and you tell yourself that's fine, that's healing, that's practical. And then some Saturday in November, you're standing at a sink with green paint on your hands, and the house smells like dinner, and there's a six-year-old asleep down the hall who learned to stomp like a T. rex today, and someone laughed in your kitchen like she forgot to be afraid
He turns the tap off.
He dries his hands.
His phone is on the counter. The screen is dark.
He picks it up. Opens his messages. Her name is right there. He has texted her twice in two months, both times about Lily's schedule, both times short and practical.
He types: today was good.
He stares at it.
He sends it before he can change his mind.
The three dots appear immediately.
He didn't expect that. She was supposed to be asleep, or at least giving him a reasonable amount of time before responding so he could pretend the message was casual. The dots are there for three seconds, and then they stop.
They don't come back.
Jake sets his phone down.
He looks at the green-stained lines of his knuckles.
He picks the phone back up. The message shows as delivered. Not read. Delivered.
Then, at eleven forty-nine, it flicks to read.
No response.
He waits.
Nothing.
He puts the phone in his pocket and goes to bed and lies in the dark thinking about the three dots that stopped, and what she typed, and why she decided not to send it.