“Wouldn’t bother me,” says Grumps with a snort.
But Sumac’s running to the garbage to empty the bowl already, and find a new one, and fill that with cereal herself, and wipe up the floor.
When Grumps is halfway through his breakfast, Sumac hisses in Aspen’s ear, “What was the something special?”
“Only a little sprinkle from the sandbox,” whispers Aspen.
Sumac pokes her in the shoulder.
Aspen pokes her even harder, in the solar plexus, so Sumac doubles over. “Sand wouldn’t kill him unless he ate kilos of the stuff!”
“No more poisoning!” whispers Sumac, right in Aspen’s face.
“Could you two behave yourselves or leave the table?” asks MaxiMum.
“I’m done anyway,” says Aspen, who’s only had a couple of bites of her breakfast sandwich. She uses her plate to juggle her crusts all the way to the sink.
Later that morning Sumac’s rounding up the dirty clothes, which is one of her favorite Lots: collecting the bags from outside each bedroom and kicking and rolling them down all the flights to Sock Heaven in the basement.
She hears balls clacking in Gameville and puts her head in to find Aspen playing a game she calls Ricochet, which is pool without cues.
“Superglue,” sings Aspen.
“What about it?” asks Sumac. “Have you made yourself a fumb again?”
Aspen draws a big rectangle in the air. Then mimes trying to open a door handle, and frowning, and struggling.
“You didn’t!”
“It’s guaranteed to annoy him,” Aspen assures her.
“Which door?” asks Sumac desperately.
“Duh, Grumps’s.”
“Is he in his room or out of it?”
As if answering her come two massive thumps from the ground floor, above them, and then the bang of a door against a wall.
“Out, now, I guess,” says Aspen, disappointed. “The old guy’s got a kick like a mule.”
“No more clever ideas,” Sumac pleads with her. Then scurries back to Sock Heaven to busy herself filling the second washing machine, so she can pretend she had nothing to do with it.
“Only if they’re ultra clever ones,” Aspen calls through the wall.
But nobody comes looking for Sumac, and the cowbell doesn’t ring, nor the police whistle (which is for family emergencies). Grumps must not have complained to any of the parents about his door being stuck shut. Maybe he thinks that’s just something that happens in a hundred-and-thirty-year-old house?
When Sumac passes the Grumpery a little later, the door is ajar; you’d never notice the little shiny line of glue unless you were looking for it.
More than one voice inside. “No bigger than your three-legged friend there —”
Does he mean Diamond? She puts her head in.
“— but this fella could kill a deer nonetheless,” says Grumps.
“Seriously?” asks Wood. He and his dog are peering into one of a set of huge boxes full of packing beads, which take up nearly the entire floor.
“No bother to him. There was one up north, suffocated a polar bear by biting his throat.”
“But a polar bear, that’s like ten times the size. Twenty. No way.” Wood says it as if he wants to believe it. He’s lifting something out of the beads now.
A head! Sumac recoils. Stuffed, glass-eyed. A terrible animal muzzle with a faint mask of silvery hair. Wood is grinning at it, nose to nose.
As Grumps bangs a hook into the wall — her blue-sky wall, that’s how Sumac still thinks of it — it releases a little shower of old plaster. Should someone with Swiss cheese for brains be allowed a hammer, she wonders? “Is that a, uh, some kind of bear?” she asks, troubled that she doesn’t know.
Grumps blinks at her. “Who invited you in, missy?”
Her throat locks. “I was just asking. There are no stupid questions,” she quotes.
He snorts as if he doesn’t agree. “It’s a wolverine,” he says, taking the horrible head from Wood and hanging it on the wall.
Diamond barks at it fiercely.
Sumac frowns. Aren’t wolverines endangered or something?
“Got a special sideways tooth in the back there, meant for tearing into frozen carrion,” says Grumps.
Wood sticks his finger into the dark maw. “Sharp!”
“Wouldn’t have been much use if it wasn’t,” says Grumps.
“Is it related to a wolf?” asks Sumac.
“More like a, a, a whatchamacallit,” says Grumps, smacking his leg quite hard, as if that’ll shake the word loose. “Pardon my tartle.”
“Your what?” says Wood.
“Tip of my tongue,” says Grumps as if to himself. “Your man here is big brother to the wee fella, long-legged….”
What’s wee with long legs? Not a spider, obviously. “Greyhound?” suggests Sumac.
“No,” he says, scornful. “Sneaky, like. Stealing eggs. Sto, stee, steasel. Weasel,” he almost shouts. “A wolverine’s a kind of weasel.” Tapping it on the muzzle.
“Can I hang up the next one?” asks Wood.
“You can not,” says Grumps.
“We’re all used to power tools from the age of, like, eight,” Wood points out.
“Mm, I gather you pick up a couple of practical things along with all the Mesopotamian nonsense.”
Sumac’s lips tighten.
Grumps fits a nail into the next hook, fingers fumbling slightly, and hammers it into the wall with three clean taps. He pulls a skull with elaborate curly horns out of the next box and fits it on the hook. “One of the famous mountain sheep of Faro.”
What kind of monster slaughters sheep for a hobby, thinks Sumac? He’s turning her lovely room into a tomb.
“I’m really psyched to go hunting sometime,” says Wood, lifting up a caribou head. “But the folks are all wary of anything more than a Nerf gun….”
“Your father’s not a bad shot.”
“PopCorn?” says Sumac, appalled.
“You’re kidding,” says Wood.
“This was back before anyone was vegetarian,” Grumps adds with scorn.
“Hey, you want to come batting with us this evening?” asks Wood.
“I was more of a footie player in my time.”
“No, not baseball — bat watching. In High Park, around sunset.” And Wood goes off on how the Urban Bat Project crowdsources data by training teens like him as rangers, blah blah blah blah blah, and what’s really getting on Sumac’s nerves is how buddy-buddy her brother’s being with the enemy all of a sudden. She’s been waiting for the right moment to ask Wood to help with her secret plan to get Grumps out of Camelottery, but now it looks like she’s too late.
Nuzu egalla bacar, she recites in her head. Ignoramuses are horribly numerous in this palace.
Even when the Lotterys do their usual summer things, these days, Sumac enjoys them about 75 percent less because of Grumps pooh-poohing them. At the Chinatown Festival, for instance, he sits on a bench (“too hard”) doing a crossword (“too easy”) and picking at his chicken cashew nut (“too spicy”) instead of coming along on a produce hunt. (The kids’ triple challenge is to find and buy a golden dragon fruit, an ice cream fruit — called that because when it’s chilled it tastes kind of like bubble gum — and a spiky, stinky durian.) Grumps barely even glances up to watch the thirty-meter dragon dance by in the parade. What would it take to please him?
On Monday half the family are going to Toytally Awesome to buy presents for Oak’s birthday. Brian’s allowed to wear her fire truck as long as she leaves it outside the store so she won’t knock stuff down with it. “I drive it to toy store and park outside,” she says.
“What I meant, obviously,” says CardaMom.
They’re waiting on the doorstep for Sic, who can’t find socks that don’t match. “He always has to have odd socks,” Sumac explains to Grumps, because that’s something else he might find weirdy. “And Aspen turns her underwear inside out, and —”
“Shut up,” Aspen roars, pink-faced. “It’s so the label won’t rub.”
Today Aspen’s T-shirt is both backward and inside out, Sumac notices. “And Catalpa will only wear gothy punky black stuff,” she goes on, “and Brian always picks boy clothes, of course. Did you see CardaMom’s ribbon dress when she was going to the Gala Gathering the other evening, and her beaded collar?”
“What are you all of a sudden,” sneers Catalpa, “some tween fashion blogger?”
MaxiMum is giving Sumac a curious look.
“Come on, Sic,” calls PopCorn. “I may only have another forty years to live!”
Aspen puts her head into the Hall of Mirrors and shrieks, “Put one of your socks inside out so it’ll be a different texture!”
Finally Sic thumps down the stairs and vaults over the last baby gate, one sock inside out.
“Why can’t you just wear sandals?” asks PopCorn, wriggling his own hairy toes.
Pulling on his sneakers, Sic shakes his head. “Don’t go there, old man. If I have to start explaining the philosophy behind my threads —”
“Can we just get out of here?” asks MaxiMum.
More delay two blocks down the street, because CardaMom can’t pass someone who’s begging without getting into a long conversation as well as giving them a twenty-dollar bill.
“So Mrs. Zhao thought I was far too young to be using a heat gun on her window,” Sic remarks, “but by the time I put the glass in, she seemed to be warming to me. She had the impression all we do is pogo and goof off, so I briefed her on the advanced trig course I’m taking. Know what’s in those boxes she’s always cramming into the Poop Cube?”
“Mangoes,” guesses Aspen randomly.
“Counterfeit money,” says Sumac.
“Personalized dolls,” Sic tells them.
“Personalized like with names?” asks Sumac, puzzled.
“Like with everything! You send in your kid’s photo and Mrs. Zhao cobbles together the right hair, skin, shirt, scans the face right onto the fabric….”
“Sinister,” says Catalpa, checking her phone.
“They’re selling like hotcakes,” he tells her.
Aspen starts “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” — she likes to sing campfire songs faster and faster as she cat’s cradles — but halfway through, Sic switches to “Flea Fly Flow Fiesta.” Sumac has to join in with that one.
Kummaloda Kummaloda Kummalod Vista
Eenie Meenie Desameenie, Ooo Wadda Wadda Meenie …
CardaMom’s the first adult to crack: “Enough!”
“Eenty teenty figgery fell.”
They all turn toward Grumps.
The old man mutters the words more than singing them, staring into space. “Ell dell doman ell, turkey turkey torry rope, am tam toory jock, you are IT!” Pointing at PopCorn. “That’s how we’d choose, for Hide and Seek.”
“Back in Glasgow, this was?” asks MaxiMum.
“Load of tosh,” says Grumps, instead of answering, and his face is all closed again.
Sic’s phone plays something ironic. “Oh, hey, Jag, thanks for getting back to me! Just hanging, yeah …” He wanders away from the group.
“If that Jag was PapaDum’s brother Jagroop,” says MaxiMum loudly, “you should call him Taya, just like you call his younger brother Chacha.”
“Why do Hindi family words have to be so complicated?” complains Catalpa.
“Family is complicated,” PopCorn tells her with a grin. “English just obscures that fact by using so few words for it.”
CardaMom says goodbye to the homeless guy and turns back to the family with a “Come on,” as if it wasn’t her keeping them waiting. “Sic can catch us up.”
“I’ll wait out here,” says Grumps when they reach the sign that says Toytally Awesome.
“Have you ever even been in a toy shop, Dad?” PopCorn asks him.
“Not that I recall.”
“Yeah, I recall a lot of playing with stones.”
“Stimulated your imagination, didn’t it?” says Grumps.
“Then let’s walk around the block to stretch our legs, Iain,” MaxiMum suggests.
“My legs are long enough.” He takes up his position against the wall.
Sic canters up to them.
“No luck with Taya?” asks Catalpa, reading his face. “Are you planning to phone up everyone you’re related to in the Greater Toronto Area and pester them into teaching you to drive?”
“Everyone he knows,” MaxiMum corrects her. “I heard him earlier giving the spiel to his old tennis teacher.”
“Your big brother’s a dog with a bone,” PopCorn tells Oak, planting kisses all over that sweat-sticky baby head.
“This reminds me of a Whac-A-Mole game,” sighs Sic, “with all of you dashing my hopes, bam, bam.”
“Why don’t you figure out something you can trade for lessons,” suggests CardaMom, “so you’re not being a parasite?”
“What a parasite?” asks Brian.
“When you jump out of an airplane, it stops you smashing to death,” Aspen tells her.
The Lotterys can’t help laughing even though Brian’s looking distinctly alarmed.
“That’s a parachute,” says MaxiMum, “and none of you are to jump out of any airplanes —”
“Not till my eighteenth birthday,” puts in Sic with a grin.
“A parasite is a user, someone who’s all take and no give,” says CardaMom. “Like a bloodsucker, or a tapeworm living in your gut.”
“Great, now you’ll really give Brian nightmares,” says PopCorn. “We were better off with the jumping out of airplanes.”
“Park your fire truck outside the store now,” Sumac reminds Brian.
“You guard it?” Brian asks Grumps.
He doesn’t say no.
Brian lifts it off — luckily she’s got an undershirt on — and places it beside him warily.
Oak comes in with them, but he’s easy to distract. If he seems to be enjoying a toy, one of them says, “Hey, Oak, Oaky-doke, look at this one,” and lifts him away while someone else smuggles the first thing to the cash register.
“Nothing made of wood, moppets,” PopCorn pleads. (Because last year Dadi Ji and Dada Ji gave Oak a set of antique-looking alphabet blocks and he threw one of them and it split Catalpa’s lip open.)
“Does bamboo count as wood?” asks Sumac.
“Well, it’s pretty light, as wood goes,” says CardaMom.
Sic reads the handwritten label hanging by a ribbon: “Sustainably sourced shakers with lovingly knitted organic covers.”
PopCorn’s crouched over a puppet theater, letting out cooing sounds. Sumac is tempted to shush him, but he’s in such a state of bliss….
“A set of cardboard prisms, pyramids, and dodecahedrons?” she suggests.
“Oak will suck them and make them gooey,” Aspen objects, very sensibly for her.
Sumac knew that, really; she just wanted them for herself.
“Forty-nine dollars ninety-five cents for a bib?” says Catalpa. “Suckers!”
“It’s ancient-grain hemp, ultra thirsty, hand edged,” says the woman behind the counter.
CardaMom gives Catalpa a mind your manners look.
Sumac wonders how a bib can be thirsty.
Aspen’s riding way too fast on the Cuddly Rocking Hippo and almost knocks over an Eiffel Tower made of Legos, so Sic sends her outside.
Catalpa checks her phone again. “Yarn-bombing with Quinn’s on again! See ya.”
“Be back before dinner,” says CardaMom.
“Probably.”
“Better be,” says Sic, “since you’re making Moroccan apricot stew.”
Catalpa groans. “The one with the carrots and the sweet potatoes and the squash and the eggplant and the peppers and the zucchini?”
“Good recall! I’ll help with the cutting up,” says CardaMom.
“When do we get to meet this new inseparable friend Quinn?” asks PopCorn.
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Catalpa flicks her hair out of her face scornfully.
“Can we hear a track from Game of Moans, at least?” asks Sic.
“Tones!”
Sumac and Aspen share a grin.
“You’re so easy to get a rise out of,” Sic says to Catalpa’s departing back, “it’s not even satisfying.”
PopCorn’s up on a Brachiosaurus Fold-out Step Set now, trying to reach the last Samurai Finger Puppet on the top shelf.
“How much?” Brian asks, holding up a net of marbles.
Sumac glances at the handwritten tag. “Only four ninety-five, but Oak’s too young for those; he’ll try to eat them.”
“Not for Oaky-doke.”
“That’s right.”
“I gots four ninety-five in piggy?”
“You probably do, tsi’t-ha,” says CardaMom, “but we’re not going to buy marbles.”
“I buy them my money out my piggy,” Brian tells her.
“Not today, honeychild.”
Just then PopCorn gets the nosepiece of his glasses entangled in the invisible thread of a mobile of the solar system. “We can’t take you anywhere,” Sumac hisses, smacking his butt, but not hard.
Finally the Lotterys have picked a few good presents for Oak. “We don’t take the tags off till we’ve paid for them,” Sic reminds Aspen, scooping a set of beanbags out of her hands.
Like playing tag, Sumac thinks: A tag means you can’t get away.
“Mission accomplished, and we didn’t even break anything,” whoops PopCorn, carrying Oak out of the shop upside down, frog shoes waving in the air.
Outside, MaxiMum’s buying a magazine from a woman with one cloudy eye and listening to her views on the mayor, while Aspen’s practicing handstands against the window of a bank. Grumps is finishing a cigarette and staring in the opposite direction.
Sumac helps Brian fit her truck on over her head and put the strings back on the red marks on her shoulders. “Don’t they hurt?”
“Nope,” lies Brian.
Sumac walks beside Grumps, trying to think of something off-putting to mention about this neighborhood. Unfortunately they pass three swanky stores in a row: artisanal cheese, custom-designed cakes, and one-of-a-kind chairs. Nothing to off-put him here. “Oodles of graffiti, aren’t there?” she says, pointing.
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