“I didn’t look in your bed,” I tell Dad. “Can we run back and check?”

“No, it’s getting dark. Birdie,” Dad says to her. “We’ll get Lilygirl tomorrow.”

“NO. NOW!” Birdie starts to cry, big tears running down her face, her mouth wide open. Watching her cry for Lilygirl gives me a sick feeling in my stomach. Why didn’t I think to look under Mom and Dad’s covers?

Mom wraps Birdie’s quilt around her and picks her up. She pats her back and sings to her, one song after another, until Birdie’s eyes close and her head falls on Mom’s shoulder.

“What do you think is going to happen?” I ask Dad. “Water is a force to be reckoned with—that’s what you always say, right?”

“Yes.” My father lets the curtain close. “And until this water finds its own level, there is nothing we can do but wait.”

“If the meteorite broke through into an aquifer, like you said, how much water is there in an aquifer?”

“I don’t know. They’re huge storehouses of water. That water could have been underground for thousands and thousands of years.”

“If the basement floods, will we have to sell the meteorite to fix the water damage? A museum in New York City once paid forty thousand dollars for a really big meteorite like ours.”

“You don’t say! That much? I’m not sure what kind of work the house will need, Henry,” my father answers.

I feel seventy-five percent glad I told Dad how much money the meteorite could be worth, but also twenty-five percent sorry it might make him feel different about the stone. Then I remember something that happened last summer.

“You know that man from Massachusetts who wanted to buy the old granite foundation stones on Nana’s land to decorate his wife’s flower garden? Nana said your great-grandfather cut and quarried the granite and built the foundation with his own hands. She said some things aren’t for sale. Remember?”

My father reaches his hand out to the curtain again, then pulls it back. If I had to guess, he’s eighty percent thinking about the water and our house and twenty percent thinking about everything else. I try to get his attention.

“You wouldn’t sell the compass your father gave you on the yard sale table.”

Dad takes the brass compass with its leather strap out of his pocket and holds it up in front of him.

“That’s true, I wouldn’t,” he agrees.

“There you are, Henry!” James runs into the kitchen. “Your mom called my dad and he was asked to pick up a night shift, so he said I could stay over and take the bus from here in the morning. I helped her make the beds upstairs. Do you want to stay in the room your father and Braggy used to share? There’s two beds in there.”