The old man shakes his head.
“FYI, I caught the pike in the lake this morning,” says Wood.
The fish sits frowning on a platter, as if it’s offended that nobody wants to eat it.
Grumps drinks from his glass, then chokes. “What kind of grapefruit do you call this?”
“Watermelon,” says Catalpa, “freshly squeezed, from the community garden MaxiMum runs.”
“Helps run,” MaxiMum corrects her.
The old man nudges his glass away from him.
Sumac meets Catalpa’s eyes, and they share a grimace. He doesn’t have to drink it, but it’s rude to shove it away as if it’s toxic slime.
The grilled cubes of halloumi are scorching hot, but Sumac loves their saltiness. Brian pants and chews frantically.
“Pelinti,” cries Sic.
“What does that mean?” asks Sumac, nibbling chicken off the bone. Sic’s like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass: He enjoys taking words out for exercise.
“Don’t encourage him,” Catalpa tells her.
“Since you ask,” says Sic, “pelinti is a Ghanaian word for shoving food around with your tongue while your mouth is open, to avoid getting scalded.”
Sic is such a clever-clogs, Sumac thinks, he makes her seem nearly normal.
“I’ve got pics of the Sligo,” he says in their grandfather’s direction. “I need to edit them down from like five hundred —”
“After dinner,” several parents chime, so Sic reluctantly puts his phone away.
Grumps has accepted a steak and a few vegetables.
“Any treasure on board the Sligo?” asks Wood glumly.
“Just limestone for road building,” says PapaDum. “She sank in a storm in the last months of World War I.”
“Were you in that one, Grammy?” Aspen cries suddenly.
Everyone stares at her. Grammy?
“Tell us about life in the olden days, do!”
Freak, Wood mouths at Aspen … who rolls up her tongue and pulls down her lower eyelids to show him the red bits.
Sumac figures it out: That was Aspen’s quoting tone. They must be lines from the video she watched about dementia. Aspen usually seems to be goofing off instead of paying attention, but stuff sticks in her memory like chewing gum on her shoes. “Technically he’d need to be about a hundred and twenty to have been in World War I,” Sumac whispers to her.
“Technically you sound more like fifty than nine, you know that?” Wood tells her.
“Let’s keep it civil, and eat up,” says MaxiMum. “How were your guide dogs this morning, Catalpa?”
“So smart. Like, if you give them the command to go forward but they see danger, they have to refuse, because their job is to know what’s best for their human.”
“Huh,” says CardaMom. “Sounds like parenthood.”
The grandfather doesn’t seem to find that funny. He lets out an awful Gollumy cough. He’s piling all the pieces of grilled eggplant way over on one side of his plate, Sumac notices, as if they’re dirty.
Oak’s wedged an entire corncob into his mouth. “You’ve bitten off more than you can chew, baby,” CardaMom tells him, tugging it out.
“Ghah,” says Oak.
“May I get down?” Aspen asks from the lawn.
“You appear to be down already,” says PapaDum.
“You’ve only had, what, half a drumstick?” says CardaMom. “You’re going to waste away.”
Sometimes, looking at Aspen’s boniness and CardaMom’s thick middle, it’s nearly impossible to believe that one of them came out of the other’s body.
“And an asparagus spear and a half a huge slice of zucchini,” calls Aspen, already halfway down the Wild, stroking Topaz.
The dessert is something called cranachan. “You like oatmeal and raspberries and cream,” PapaDum reminds Brian.
“Not musheded,” she says disgustedly. She slides off the bench and heads back to the big cardboard box that their last computer came in, which she’s painting red for some reason.
“And here’s the adult version,” says PopCorn, pushing a full bowl toward his father. “D’you remember Mum used to add as much Scotch as cream?”
No comment. But Grumps does eat it, at least.
It’s getting dark now: Fireflies blink their tiny lamps in the bushes. Farther down the Wild, Aspen and Brian are battling with lightsabers.
Sic burps as he pushes away his empty bowl. “Excuse me, peeps. Shemomedjamo!”
This time, Sumac stops herself from asking what that means. She spoons up her last smear of pink cream instead.
“I can tell by the general stunned silence that you’re all wondering —”
“Whether you’ll ever shut up, know-it-all,” says Catalpa.
“Ah, you flatter me, sis. I wouldn’t say I know it all,” says Sic, “just most things. It’s been posited that not since 1800 has it been possible for one person to have a grasp on the sum total of human knowledge. No, I prefer to call myself simply a prodigy, a genius, if you will, a —”
Wood reaches across the table with two hands and presses his brother’s mouth shut so hard that Sic’s eyes bulge.
Grumps is squinting at the two of them, the way a sniper would look through the sights of his rifle.
All this squabbling and messing around was fun till the old man came, Sumac thinks. Now it’s embarrassing, because he’s watching and judging. And what gives him the right? Grumps has got butter all down his shirt, she notices, and he’s picking something out of his teeth with one ridged nail. How come the Lotterys were supposed to improve their table manners for this guy?
Sumac is suddenly so miserable, the only way she can think to cheer herself up is to go lie on her bed with a big stack of books….
But her bed isn’t her bed anymore, Sumac remembers as she carries her plate into the Mess, and her room isn’t her room. She smacks down the plate so hard, she’s afraid she’s cracked it.
She toils up the three flights of stairs. Everything’s off in the room Sumac still thinks of as Spare Oom: how the light slants in, the heavy slope of the ceiling (like a box some giant’s crushed with his foot), the way the bed’s facing — and the mattress is way too hard. The walls are a boring shade of nothing. Sumac picked these pale blue curtains — out of PopCorn’s trunk of fabrics from all over the world — because they were the nearest thing to her sky mural, but now she hates them. This summer, nothing’s the way it was or the way it should be.
* * *
It’s just nine of them going to the beach on Saturday, because Catalpa’s busy in her mysterious teenage way, and PapaDum’s taken Grumps to the dentist.
“Aspen,” says MaxiMum, stepping out the front door into the glare of the sun, “I’m intrigued that you’ve chosen your roller shoes for cycling to the beach.”
“Don’t have any others.”
MaxiMum allows herself a single roll of the eyes. “You have many others.”
“Yeah, but where?”
“Can we go already?” asks Wood, sinking a basketball in one graceful arc across the Hoopla.
“Have you tried the Loseded and Finded?” Sumac asks Aspen. The gigantic tub down in the Mud Room used to be called the Lost and Found, but Brian’s version of the name is the one that’s stuck.
“I keep forgetting to,” admits Aspen.
“Run!” CardaMom urges her.
“Come on, people, let’s get moving,” says Wood. “Sumac!”
He hurls the ball so hard, she catches it against her ribs and it knocks the breath out of her. She weighs up whether to complain or play. She frowns at the hoop and aims at it….
But the ball bounces off the stonework, way too high, and shoots past the Zhaos’ bungalow just as their brown bulgy car is backing out.
Mrs. Zhao blares the horn as if Sumac’s thrown a hand grenade under her wheels.
“Sorry,” shouts Sumac, not knowing whether she should race to retrieve the ball, or whether that means the woman will run
her down. She wipes her forehead and smiles ditheringly.
“Don’t take it personally, that hag doesn’t like anyone,” says Wood as the car — which Brian calls the Poop Cube — disappears down the street.
“Not even Mr. Zhao?” asks Sumac.
“Him least of all.”
“Hard to be sure of that, because we’ve never heard Mr. Zhao speak any English, and other languages often sound angry if you don’t know them,” CardaMom points out.
“But remember that Christmas I went over with a plate of PapaDum’s quadruple chocolate cookies, just out of the oven,” says PopCorn, hurrying down the steps, “and Mrs. Zhao claimed they didn’t eat cookies?” He starts fiddling with the combination lock of the bicycle cage. “Is it SWIFT? SWEAT? I thought a word would be easier to remember than numbers.”
CardaMom grins, pushing him aside. “You know too many words. It’s SPEED.”
Brian comes down the steps one at a time, carrying a big plastic shovel and pail.
“Guess who gets to ride in the high seat today?” PopCorn reaches for her.
A shake of the fuzzy head as Brian backs out of range. “I ride my red bike.”
“Yeah, but the thing of it is, tsi’t-ha,” says CardaMom, “we’re cycling a long, long way along the boardwalk to the beach, and —”
“Ride red bike no training wheels!”
“Honeychild —”
Aspen pops back out of the house, holding up a sandal and a rubber boot. (Both lefties, Sumac notices).
“That’s my boot,” roars Wood.
“She’s not going to wear your boot,” MaxiMum tells him. “OK, Aspen, stay in your rollers, but pass me the gizmo to take the wheels out, at least.”
Aspen’s eyes go vague.
“Isn’t the gizmo on the hook just inside the door, where it lives?” asks CardaMom.
“It definitely was,” says Aspen.
CardaMom leans her head against MaxiMum’s bony shoulder for a moment. “Marry me and take me away from all this,” she groans.
MaxiMum strokes her hair. “Aspen will wear her rollers, and if the wheels get bunged up with sand, she’ll have learned something useful.”
It always takes so long for the Lotterys to leave the house, Sumac really should have asked for screen time so she could go back upstairs and do another twenty-minute strawberry on Mesopotamian customs.
But an hour later, as she stands up to her waist in Lake Ontario, reading Tintin in Tibet, she has to admit that this is a good place to be. A whole day stretching ahead without the new grandfather in it …
Back on shore, Sumac finds PopCorn trying to nap under a wonky tepee of sarongs stretched over driftwood, with the New Yorker magazine over his face. Oak keeps burying PopCorn’s enormous feet in the sand and choking with laughter when the toes reappear. Brian won’t wear her sun hat, so her head’s all slippery with sunblock, except for patches where sand has stuck to the fuzz.
CardaMom press-gangs Sumac into some complicated ecological game in which Brian’s playing the invasive zebra mussel, Wood’s a rare bald eagle, and Sumac’s the native sturgeon fish he’s trying to catch. (Aspen was the sturgeon, but now she’s way out in the lake, floating on her back.)
“What be Oak?” Brian wants to know.
“Ah …” Sumac considers her little brother in the sand. His crawling’s getting much faster.
“The water,” suggests CardaMom.
“You water, Oaky-doke. Wavy wavy!” Brian mimes it for him.
He waves his sandy fist. Wood strolls up to grab a banana.
“Oh, I have a joke,” says Sumac, remembering.
Wood makes a sound of pain.
“Maybe it’s a bit too hot for jokes,” murmurs CardaMom.
“No, it has to be now because it’s to do with bald eagles,” says Sumac. “What’s the only bird that needs to wear a wig?”
“Threw it away again,” Wood tells her, shaking his head in disgust. “If you hadn’t said in advance about the bald eagle, that would almost have been funny.”
Sumac scowls.
Bringing her book over to where PopCorn lies in the shadow of the driftwood tepee, she flops down beside him. From the sound of his breathing she can tell he’s not actually asleep. Remembering the population of Faro, she finds a pencil in the swim bag and does long division in the margin of his fallen magazine. (She could use the calculator app on a parent’s phone, but she needs the mental exercise.) “Did you know for every Faro neighbor your dad used to say hi to, in Toronto there’s … seven thousand two hundred and eighty-nine people.”
“Huh,” says PopCorn. “When you put it that way —”
“No wonder he’s a bit out of sorts. Good point, Sumac,” calls CardaMom from behind a music score.
Was that her point?
CardaMom goes on, “Think of having to leave everything you know five thousand kilometers behind, with no warning….”
That’s even worse than having to move bedrooms, it occurs to Sumac. She’s suddenly so sorry for Grumps she feels a bit sick.
“Who?” says Aspen, practicing headstands beside PopCorn.
“My dad,” he says.
“How much longer’s he staying?”
Sumac sighs. “Do you never listen?”
“It’s not your sister’s forte,” PopCorn reminds her. “We’re going to give it a few weeks and see how we all rub along,” he tells Aspen.
“I’ve got other fortes,” she says, a little breathless as she straightens one leg in the air, then the second. “At least forty fortes!” She drops sideways onto him.
PopCorn lets out a scream — which makes the couple near them stare — then pretends to die, so the girls have to do CPR and defibrillation on him (with stones for the electric paddles), which is always good for a laugh.
“We were thinking you could be your grandfather’s guide,” says MaxiMum, coming over with a flask of water.
It’s Sumac she’s looking at.
Sumac stares. A guide, like Catalpa’s dogs? We were thinking? Which of the parents was dumb enough to suggest that? Isn’t it enough that Sumac has to give up her room to the intruder, who’s messing up the whole summer?
“Just for the first while,” calls CardaMom. “Show him round, explain how we do things….”
Sumac keeps her lips pressed together, because if she lets out even half of what she’s thinking, CardaMom’s brown eyes will fill with disappointment.
She sidles off up the beach, drawing a long line in the sand with her foot. She thinks of writing a message: SOS!
Sic’s heading back to shore with his splashy front crawl. Sumac waits till he’s walking through the foam. “So what do you make of him?”
Sic knows who she means. “Mm, a wee bit dour, in’t he?” he says in his best Scottish.
“What’s dour?”
“Sulky.” Sic pulls down the sides of his smile. “But you have to remember, the venerable dude was born in the thirties. He’s, like, as old as television, older than the ballpoint pen.”
The ballpoint pen? That stuns Sumac.
“Let’s give him a while to learn our foreign ways,” suggests Sic. “He’ll crack under my barrage of charm in the end, everybody does.”
“What’s a barrage of —”
“Like, bombardment. Onslaught. Nonstop charm attack.”
“Not everybody cracks under your barrage of charm,” Sumac points out. “Those three girls from Vancouver at Camp Jagged Falls —”
“They were just pretending,” he assures her. “It was, like, a thing between us.”
A can’t-stand-Sic-Lottery thing, Sumac thinks.
She goes back to the blanket to collect Oak, because he usually cheers her up. “Big splashes, Oaky?” She lugs him to where Wood’s skimming stones and sits him down right in the foam.
Wood’s searching through his pile for the most triangular flat ones. (Sumac knows the theory, but she just can’t throw, and the last thing she’s going to do is ask her brother for a less
on.) He skims one: It skips once, twice, then drops.
“What’s your record?” she asks.
“Still eight.” He throws one that lands with a big plop, and Oak laughs and does one of those claps where his hands miss and his plumpy arms smack instead. “When I’m eighteen, I might move over to the Islands,” Wood says, nodding at the green shore across the water.
The thought of him — of any of her siblings — leaving home startles Sumac.
“They used to be a peninsula sticking out of Toronto,” he adds.
“When, in caveman times?”
“No, right up till 1858,” says Wood. He points west, to where the beach ends abruptly: “One night the Islands broke off in a storm.”
She tries to picture it. The waves rising and crashing and the ground disappearing, so when you woke up the next morning, you were cut off from land….
She picks Oak up, but he wails, so she dips his fat legs into the water again. “Belugas can dive down to seven hundred meters,” she tells Wood.
“Oh yeah?”
“They live in unstable pods. That means if you’re not enjoying the pod you’re with, you can swim off and join another anytime.”
“We’ve all had days like that,” says Wood grimly.
Brian runs down to the water’s edge now, with PopCorn and Aspen chasing behind because she’s insisting on trying to float on her back without her poopy peefdy. (That’s what she calls her PFD, for personal flotation device.)
They all stand there while Brian thrusts her tummy up so hard that lake water washes over her face and makes her splutter and stand again. And repeat. “How much of seconds?” she demands.
“One,” says Sumac, rounding up a little.
Wood flicks a stone, dangerously close to his little sister.
“How much now?” Brian stands up, coughing out water.
“Ah … one and a half seconds,” says PopCorn. “Tummy high, like a cake rising!”
“How much?” splutters Brian the next time, clawing something green off her cheek.
“I — sorry, sprog,” he says, “I wasn’t counting that time.”
“Count! Watch me, Oaky.” She throws herself backward.
Sumac’s arms are getting tired, so she gives Oak one more ducking to his grubby neck, then passes him to PopCorn, who’s scratching a sunburned bit of his neck tattoo.
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