The nice thing about rain is that it always stops. Eventually. (Eeyore)

Penny packed her things in plain brown boxes and labelled them appropriately with a black permanent marker that emitted fumes that made her dizzy. Tommy came over when he thought she would be done and he looked around the barren room with its dull green walls and pink floral trim.

He picked Penny up and tossed her over his shoulder. “Moving on up to the east side, to a de-lux apartment in the sky,” he sang.

Penny laughed uncontrollably as he flailed her around like a rag doll. She argued futilely to the put down.

“Put down?” he asked after the debacle carried on for long enough and tossed to the sinking center of her creaky child’s bed. “I didn’t want to keep you anyway.”

She pouted and he leaped on top of her. She squealed and giggled and her father left the house.

“You know what is amazing?” she asked as they lay atop her bed amid the teetering towers of plain boxes.

“Me?”

She laughed. “No.”

He turned away from her with dramatized hurt. She ignored him.

“You are in my bedroom right now. You are lying on top of my bed and my door is wide open, my parents know you’re here, this isn’t a secret or a scandal, this is our life and this is okay. Isn’t that amazing? I have lay in this bed and cried because of you and slept so I could dream in hopes of seeing you. Now you’re here. It’s amazing.”

He kissed her forehead.

She moved into his room at Senior’s house and felt into step with the rest of the family as if she had been there all along. Rider left for California the week after she moved in. She wished him well with his studies and he wished her well with hers.

“Good luck,” he said.

“Thank you,” she smiled. “We’ll have to compare horror stories at Christmas.”

“You’re living with my family; yours will be worse than mine.”

She laughed. There was nowhere she would rather be living.