“Yeah, and one of these days I’m going to strangle her with that string,” mutters PopCorn.
“Hate speech and death threats, you goin’ to jail,” crows Aspen.
Grumps slurps his tea.
“Catalpa, Empress of the Night?” asks PopCorn.
Wandering in like a sleepwalker, Catalpa yawns in his direction.
“What’s your goal, your passion, your quest for today?”
“Waking up.” Lush eyelashes resting on her cheeks.
“How’s your graphic design course coming along?” asks PapaDum.
“Coming along,” she murmurs, taking a piece of French toast and nibbling it.
Thunk, thunk: Sic bounds into the Mess on his pogo stick.
“Get off that thing,” orders Catalpa, covering her ears.
He jumps down. “Up late cyberjamming with Game of Groans, were we?”
“Game of Tones!”
Sniggers around the table.
“I never sleep, hardly,” Aspen boasts. “I always get up in the night and play and try not to wake people.”
Grumps snorts.
“Does she disturb you, Iain?” asks CardaMom.
No answer.
“At least I don’t flush the toilet,” says Aspen, triumphant.
Nobody dares smile.
“Anyway. OK if I go rehearse at someone’s place this afternoon?” asks Catalpa.
“A real-world experience,” marvels PopCorn. “Whose house?”
“Probably Quinn’s.”
“Leave us her parents’ number.”
“So hey, speaking of real-world activities,” says Sic, “would you guys be cool with covering the application fee for my learner’s license?”
“Are you still at this?” asks PapaDum, shaking his head in wonder.
“Do you need a license to drive … your parents mad?” Aspen asks, bouncing up and down on her ball. “Get it? Get it?”
“We get it,” MaxiMum assures her.
Aspen’s jokes aren’t always so hilarious either, Sumac thinks.
Grumps doesn’t seem to hear any of this. But he’s not deaf; Sumac is pretty sure of that now. It’s as if the Lotterys are seagulls and he’s just shutting his ears to their yakking and yawping.
“This is an educational qualification we’re talking about, Moms ’n’ Pops,” says Sic, hand on heart.
“So is a hot air balloon pilot’s license,” MaxiMum tells him, “but not one you’re in immediate need of, given that we don’t own a hot air balloon.”
“That’s defeatist thinking.”
CardaMom hoots with laughter and leans across the table to kiss Sic on the nose, knocking over a not-quite-empty jug of milk with her chest.
“Argh.” Sumac lifts up her glass so it doesn’t get wet.
“Uh-oh,” Oak sings out.
“This house!” That’s Catalpa.
“Sorry,” cries CardaMom, running for a cloth.
“So was that kiss a yes?” Sic wants to know.
“No, treasure,” says CardaMom, “it was a kiss.”
“What about chipping in, say, seventy percent, to encourage me,” says Sic, “because I’m growing my skills instead of lying around reading sword-and-sorcery and scratching my bug bites all summer?”
Catalpa reaches out to thump him, but he blocks her fist with his plate.
“You need encouragement like a giraffe needs a longer neck,” she tells him.
Aspen mimes the giraffe, making everyone laugh. Well, everyone except Grumps.
“C’mon, work with me, people,” begs Sic. “Fifty percent?”
“Maybe thirty?” suggests PopCorn, looking between the other parents.
“Forty percent, we have a deal!” Sic punches the air and nobody contradicts him.
“Were you out early this morning?” PapaDum asks Wood, who’s just come in.
“Sunrise,” he says with a nod. “Saw a rabbit, a red cardinal, two snakes — probably eastern garters, but they were pretty small so they could have been Butler’s garters, except they slid off too fast for me to count the scale rows.”
“Do you think they were mother and baby?” Sumac asks.
Wood shrugs. “They looked about the same size, but I don’t know how long snakes take to grow up.”
Aspen rolls back on her ball so far that she nearly falls on her butt. “Are they monotonous?”
“Not to me,” snaps Wood. “Now cat’s freakin’ cradle, that’s what I’d call monotonous.”
“What monotonous?” asks Brian.
“Boring,” Sumac tells her.
Aspen shakes her head, brown hair falling in her eyes. “Monotonous like pears.”
That puzzles everyone.
“Juicy pears?” asks Brian.
“No! Married.”
“She means do snakes live in pairs, couples,” says Sumac after a second.
“Monogamous! Our code breaker,” says PopCorn, squeezing Sumac’s neck.
“Great question, Aspen, and I’m stumped,” says MaxiMum. “Family life of snakes, anyone?”
“I doubt they’re monogamous,” says Catalpa. “Not with their slithery, sneaky reputation.”
Wood rolls his eyes. “That’s just squeamish humans making up lies about them. Bees kill way more people in Ontario than snakes do.”
“Only in self-defense,” says Sumac hotly. “You owe every third bite of that to a bee —” and she pokes Wood’s French toast.
“Hands off my food!” Wood slaps her fingers away.
“Let’s keep it civil,” says MaxiMum.
“Snakeses be married?” asks Brian.
“Yes, that was our original question, wasn’t it? I challenge Wood to find out.”
“Wolves.” The word erupts from Grumps.
“What’s that, Iain?” asks CardaMom with a smile. “What about wolves?”
“One male, one female, paired for life. It’s nature’s way.”
Sumac checks the parents’ faces, which have all gone stony. “Oh, Dad, I think you’ll find nature’s got lots of different ways,” says PopCorn.
Grumps makes a humph sound. “One male,” he says again, “one female.”
The silence feels like static to Sumac, as if any second now, she’ll get an electric shock. Sic is not smiling, for once. Catalpa’s sucking her lips and Wood’s doing his tough-guy stare. Aspen’s the only one who’s oblivious, eyes almost shut as she makes a Jacob’s Ladder with her string.
“Uh-oh!” says Oak.
PapaDum examines a fresh scratch on Wood’s cheekbone. “You should put antibiotic cream on that.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Which they all know means he won’t.
“May I be excused?” asks Aspen, jumping up.
“Did you eat your French toast?” CardaMom asks.
The plate Aspen’s holding high in the air like a waiter is empty. “I suspect someone else did,” says MaxiMum.
“Increased nutritional needs of puberty,” says Wood, thumping his chest like a gorilla.
“OK, but let’s have another go at your twelve times tables this morning,” MaxiMum says to Aspen … who lets out a groan as if she’s been stabbed.
“Keep at it,” PapaDum tells her. “No use climbing halfway up a coconut tree.”
“Is that one of your wise Indian proverbs?” asks Sumac.
“You know me well,” says PapaDum in his father’s accent, waggling his head.
When you’re halfway up a coconut tree, you’ve done half the work but you don’t have half the coconut yet. So yeah, Sumac supposes, it would be a waste to slither down again….
“Got to rush.” PopCorn stands up too. “I’m running Parent Break around the corner in twenty minutes.” (That means parents get two hours off while PopCorn’s doing his charming Pied Piper thing at the kids’ center, but he jokes that it’s called that because it’s for parents who are about to break.) “Who wants to teach tinies how to make sparkle lanterns?”
None of the other Lotterys seem to be in t
he mood for volunteering today.
“I’m working toward breaking the world record for most jumps,” says Sic, brandishing his pogo stick, “which, as you’ll all recall, is two hundred and six thousand, eight hundred and sixty-four, in twenty hours, thirteen minutes.”
Sumac seizes the moment. “I know a funny joke about jumping.”
“Dude, it kills it when you start like that,” says Wood. “Makes us all tense.”
“Yeah,” Sic tells her, “why don’t you just slide it into conversation, and if by some miracle we laugh, then hey, score!”
Sumac scowls. “Do you want to hear my joke or not?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?” groans Catalpa.
“Full marks for persistence, anyway,” says PapaDum.
“Here goes.” Sumac clears her throat. “What dog can jump higher than a building?”
“Hm,” CardaMom starts, “what dog —”
“Any dog,” says Aspen in a bored robot voice, “because buildings can’t jump.”
“I could tell jokes just fine if you’d stop stealing my punch lines,” roars Sumac.
Sic gives her a sympathetic grin before heading out.
“Don’t forget your helmet,” MaxiMum calls.
He shakes his head. “Forecast says the temperature’s due to spike today, especially with the humidity, and my head’s going to melt if I squish my ’fro into a helmet. Sixteen’s old enough to make a reasoned decision not to look like a dork.”
“The stuff you do with your goofy friends,” says Wood, “unicycling, parkour, fountaineering — you realize none of them are actual sports?”
“Yeah,” says Catalpa, “they’re just attention seeking. You guys look like such dorks, with or without helmets, none of you will ever have a girlfriend.”
“Right,” says Sic, “whereas spending your summer scooping doggy doo makes you irresistible!”
CardaMom stacks plates in the dishwasher. “If growing up in this house hasn’t taught you all not to care whether you look cool or not, then I’m going to give up and send you all to school.”
“Ha ha ha,” says Sic, doing a ghost train sound effect. “The same hollow threat you’ve been making for sixteen years.”
They’re all just chattering away as usual, thinks Sumac, looking at her grandfather, who’s got his head down over his tea. As if Grumps is an accident in the highway, and the safest thing is to drive on by.
* * *
Wednesday’s Garbage Night, and they only get home when the sun’s going down, with a good haul in Oak’s bike chariot: a mannequin’s hand and three polystyrene heads that could be great for making puppets, some only slightly scratched frames, lots of floppy roses to dry into petal confetti, a VHS player and a smoke alarm and a coffeemaker to take apart and study, two feather boas, and a fancy birdcage Sharp-Eye Sumac spotted, which might be a hundred years old. “Though really the very best,” she tells CardaMom on the stairs, “was when we saw a skunk with five babies coming up the alley, waving their tails.”
“Fantastic,” says CardaMom, in a whisper because Oak (in his sleep sack) is conked out on her, his hair all slick with sweat.
Sumac goes up on tiptoes to kiss her brother’s ear — the left, more-sticky-out one that’s always slightly creased.
“MaxiMum and I are going in the Hot Tub once I’ve put this fellow down,” whispers CardaMom. “Could you knock on your grandfather’s door and check he’s taken his evening pills?”
Why me? is what Sumac wants to ask, but she knows the answer: She’s the guide dog. Which was a huge ask, and they shouldn’t have asked it in the first place, and she shouldn’t have failed-to-say-no except that she didn’t want her parents to stop thinking of her as such a mature, helpful, rational being.
“Here, Sumac,” says MaxiMum, coming out of the moms’ room with a tube. “I picked up more of his eyebrow cream.”
So Sumac goes downstairs and makes herself tap on the door. It still has a tiny hole from the nail that held up the Sumac’s Room sign. But the kids have started to call it the Grumpery (though there’s no sign saying so, obviously).
A grunt from the other side. Sumac can’t tell if it means come in or go away. She taps again. Is that tobacco she’s smelling?
The door swoops open.
“Ah, hi. CardaMom wanted to remind you to take your medicine.”
Grumps jerks his head a little. Does that mean he’s already taken it and doesn’t need reminding, or he has no intention of taking it? He’s got a cigarette half-hidden behind him.
“Did you forget?” asks Sumac, pointing.
He looks at the cigarette as if it’s somebody else’s.
She scrunches up her nose. “Remember you have to go outside for that?”
“I didn’t forget anything, missy,” says Grumps. “I just didn’t think it was anybody’s business what I do in my own room.”
Sumac chews her lip. “Smoking kills.”
“Who cares? I’m eighty-two,” he says. But he steps back and stubs the cigarette out on a saucer.
Doesn’t he realize he’s probably giving all the Lotterys cancer, especially Oak, because he’s closest to the ground, where the smoke hangs? Sumac takes a tiny step into the room that’s so nasty now. “And here’s more of the special cream to help your eyebrows grow back faster.”
He rolls his eyes. “What call have I for eyebrows, at this point?”
Sumac is thrown by the question. Why does anyone need eyebrows? Are they to stop sweat running into our eyes? Or rain?
He takes the tube out of her hand anyway. “What’s all the clatter and banging at this time of the evening?”
She explains about Garbage Night.
But she must not have done a very good job of it, because the old man is goggling at her. “Ye grub around in folks’ rubbish?”
“It’s scavenging, like a treasure hunt,” she says, “and it’s, you know, kind to the planet, especially as we clean up with trash pickers and pooper scoopers as we go along. We’re like the Wombles.” Would he ever have read the Wombles books? “Little bears who reuse and recycle?”
He snorts. “Gadzillionaires — have ye no shame?”
Sumac is suddenly very tired. There’s that smell again, sort of stale and sweetish: She thinks it’s him. “Why haven’t you put anything up except your flower calendar?” He’s drawn a line through seven of the days now.
“Won’t be here much longer, will I?” says Grumps.
“Won’t you?” That sounded way too eager. “Oh,” Sumac tries again, in an almost regretful voice. What could he mean? Her eyes lodge on the purple flower of the calendar again. “What’s the circle?” she asks, pointing to the thirty-first of July.
“D-day. D for Departure,” says Grumps with satisfaction.
Her pulse starts to go bang-bang. That’s a week from today. “Where are you departuring — departing to?”
“My own wee house in Faro, of course. A couple of weeks, on a trial basis, they said, and we’ll see.” The words are pouring out now, and Grumps’s lip is spotty with spit. “When the fortnight’s up, they’ll have to admit that it’s all been a botch and a bungle, because I’m fighting fit. Mens sana in corpore sano.”
“Is that Spanish?” Sumac wonders.
“Do you not have a word of Latin?”
“I know some Sumerian,” she says in a small voice.
Grumps thumps his chest with a hollow sound, then knocks on his head. “A healthy mind in a healthy body is what it means. Maybe not as sharp as I used to be in this department” — tapping his head again — “but that’s par for the course. Getting older’s not a disease! I’ve gone along with all this testing nonsense, let the whitecoats poke and prod and nag me, just to set Reginald’s mind at rest that there’s nothing serious the matter. I’m as compos mentis as he is — it’s not me who believes in star signs and auras!”
It’s the most Sumac’s ever heard this old man say. Grumps sounds almost happy, for the first time. “You say you�
��re compost —”
“More Latin: compos mentis. Look it up, as your colored mum’s always saying.”
Sumac steps out and shuts the door behind her, quite loudly: nearly a slam. He deserves it for calling MaxiMum colored in that sneery tone.
She marches upstairs to the treadmill desk and fingers through the big dictionary. Compos mentis. It sounds like minty compost. Found it: Of sound or composed mind.
Oh. So Grumps doesn’t believe he’s losing his marbles at all, or only a normal amount for eighty-two. Could it just possibly be like that time the doctor was worried MaxiMum might have a kidney stone, but then she got the all clear?
It’s true, PopCorn did say something about a couple of weeks. If all the rest of it is true — if it turns out it’s all been a mistake about the dementia — then Grumps can go home, and everything at Camelottery can go back to normal! (Of course, he’d scoff at the idea that anything here is normal. How things used to be, then.)
Sumac jumps up and down on the treadmill. Egg salad, as Brian would say!
The Lotterys can’t go to the Powwow this year (because let’s keep things simple, which is code for having to look after Grumps). That means it’ll be who knows how long before they see Baba — one of their real, nice grandfathers. When she hears this, Sumac so nearly blurts out, “But if his test results come back and he’s compos mentis enough, he’ll be flying home to Faro before the weekend.” She manages to keep her mouth zipped, not wanting to count chickens before they hatch; if she says it out loud, it might not happen.
The old man spends most of his time sitting in his stark room, listening to classical music on the radio. Killing time like a prisoner in solitary confinement, Sumac supposes.
On Monday morning he says no to the beach, so MaxiMum wonders aloud if maybe he’s not feeling up to the exertion in this heat. Grumps tells her he’s in the pink of health, thank you very much, and no he doesn’t need a taxi since he hasn’t forgotten how to ride a bike yet, and he stomps off to get his towel. That’s called reverse psychology; it’s how the Lotterys trick Brian into changing her socks by saying maybe she’s not able to do it all by herself.
PapaDum’s staying home, because Oak’s gone kaput in his stroller already, and also he’s going to fix those sagging shelves in the Bookery and make seafood paella. (But really because he’s a homebody who needs a Parent Break every now and then.) Whizzing along the cycle path at the back of the pack of Lotterys, Sumac stares at Grumps’s pale hairy shanks going around and around on PapaDum’s bike. She can’t help wondering what the statistics are about people of eighty-two falling off bikes.
The Lotterys Plus One Page 10