No answer from her grandfather.
“Catalpa’s gone off to do it with wool.”
Grumps’s forehead creases as if he has no idea what she means.
“Oh, look, there’s the rehab center for drug addicts,” Sumac says, pointing it out. Two badly sunburned men are half lying on the step: all the better. “And that shop there is a tiny little mosque,” she adds. She bets he doesn’t like mosques. The bait shop, hm; would Grumps think worms were weirdy, or does he like fishing?
He doesn’t respond to any of this.
As they pass a Caribbean café, Sumac asks, “Do you like roti?” Hoping he doesn’t.
“Roast?”
“No, roti, like potato curry wrapped in bread. Sometimes with goat in it,” she adds with relish; she’s pretty sure that Grumps doesn’t eat goat.
Shouts, from behind them. “Excuse me! Excuse me!” It’s the woman from Toytally Awesome, all out of breath and hair stuck to her face as she catches up with the Lotterys. “I’m sorry, but — your boy stole something.” Pointing at Brian.
“She’s a girl,” says Aspen before anyone can stop her.
“Not a girl,” objects Brian.
PopCorn and CardaMom exchange a helpless glance.
“Well, he — there’s an item in his, in her pocket,” says the woman confusedly.
Brian grips the sides of her fire truck as if she’s about to speed off in it.
“Maybe you took a toy and forgot to pay, sweet peach?” PopCorn murmurs.
“I gots four ninety-five in piggy but CardaMom say no!” Eyes brimming, Brian reaches down below her fire truck and yanks the marbles out of the pocket of her shorts.
CardaMom sighs. “I’m so sorry, it was a misunderstanding. Brian, can you give them back, please?”
But the tiny hand stays locked.
The woman from Toytally Awesome grabs hold of the net.
“Our Grumps need marbles!” Brian pulls back. One marble, then another, then a whole flood of them cascades to the sidewalk.
Aspen bursts out laughing.
“He’s lost his marbles.” Sumac’s nearly shouting it. “Our grandfather. That’s what Brian means, he’s got dementia, and she thinks —”
Grumps narrows his eyes at Sumac as if she’s the rudest person in the world.
Her whole head goes hot.
Aspen chases in all directions, picking up fistfuls of marbles and making a bag of her T-shirt to hold them.
The woman from the store is looking appalled.
“I finded just one in the playground only small,” sobs Brian, tears scudding down her face.
“Losing your marbles, that just means you can’t think too clearly,” MaxiMum is saying to Brian very quietly.
“That why I tookeded them! There be big boss ones so Grumps can think extra well —” Then Brian remembers the ripped bag is empty and shakes it tragically.
“Gotcha,” Aspen says. She’s facedown in the gutter, snatching a handful from the brink of a storm drain.
“What do we owe you?” PopCorn asks the store owner.
She flaps her hands. “That’s all right.”
“No, no, ma’am, you’re very kind, but …” He hurries back toward Toytally Awesome at her side.
MaxiMum lets out one of her long meditation breaths. “Right. Every last marble off this street before someone falls over one and breaks a hip.”
The Lotterys collect them all, or nearly.
“Did you know the more you cry the less you have to pee?” Sumac tells Brian, to cheer her up.
“That interesting,” Brian admits, sniffling.
She goes over to Grumps with one huge marble.
He looks at it as if it’s a dog poop and turns away.
I hate him, thinks Sumac. Relieved to let herself say it, even if it’s only in the privacy of her own head.
Aspen insists on tying a knot in her T-shirt to hold the marbles in, jogging home with her tummy and ribs showing below a bobbing attachment like some kind of tumor.
Sumac catches up with CardaMom. “I only explained about the dementia so the woman wouldn’t think Brian’s a robber,” she says in a small voice.
“I know.”
“If it’s a true thing, why is it a secret?”
“It’s not, not exactly. It’s a touchy subject,” says CardaMom.
PopCorn catches up with the Lotterys.
“What’s that?” asks MaxiMum, pointing at his elegant paper bag sealed with a ribbon.
“She wouldn’t let me pay for the blasted marbles, kept saying what a ‘sweet little person’ Brian is, so I had to grab the first thing I saw, which was the fifty-dollar thirsty bib.”
Sumac almost laughs, but swallows it so her throat hurts.
* * *
On Thursday it’s even hotter. Aspen comes down to dinner stark naked. When CardaMom tells her to put some clothes on, Aspen says, “FYI, your Mohawk ancestors — the kids traditionally didn’t wear anything in the summer.” With a glance at their grandfather to see if he’s shocked.
“Well, this is a nontraditional household, so you can wear my apron,” says CardaMom, slipping it over Aspen’s head before she can object. It’s the huge sparkly one that says That’s Opportunity Knocking, So Don’t Complain About the Noise! and it comes down nearly to Aspen’s ankles.
Disappointingly, Grumps is ignoring the whole thing; he’s tucking into PapaDum’s twelve-layer lasagna as if he’s starving. Sumac supposes Italian doesn’t count as what he calls ethnic food.
She hardly eats any lasagna herself because she’s nervous about her presentation.
“Scored a driving coach, by the way,” announces Sic, very blasé.
“Seriously?” asks Catalpa. “You’ve guilted or tricked some adult into —”
“I have entered into a mutually beneficial arrangement with a local entrepreneur,” he interrupts, “which incidentally is going to look fantastic on my résumé. In exchange for a complete overhaul of her antiquated website, Mrs. Zhao will be putting me on her insurance as an Occasional Driver and taking me out three evenings a week.”
Amazement all around. “In the Poop Cube?” asks Sumac.
“The salesman told her it was called Bitter Chocolate Pearl.”
“What’s all the hoo-ha?” Grumps wants to know.
PapaDum explains.
“Driving, that’s useful, anyway,” says the old man.
High praise, indeed: Sic waggles his eyebrows at Sumac. “Our gracious neighbor’s a tough negotiator,” he adds. “I argued that web design of my caliber is a way more specialist skill than driving, but she pointed out that I need this deal at least twice as much as she does … so I have to do two hours’ work for every hour she takes me on the road.”
“We should go talk to her,” says CardaMom to the other parents, “check she’s not just being nice.”
PopCorn snorts. “Nice? This is Mrs. Zhao we’re talking about.”
“Well, it proves that anything’s possible,” says PapaDum.
“Or maybe that there’s nothing Sic can study that’ll get him farther than his powers of persuasion,” says CardaMom.
“Never needed to study charm, Momma,” he says with a Southern accent and a smirk.
It occurs to Sumac that this is the ideal moment, because everyone seems to be in a relatively good mood. “Can I do a presentation?”
“Sure,” says PapaDum. “More Mesopotamians?”
“Actually —”
“Is this going to take long?” Catalpa’s on her feet already. “Because Sheryl and Celize and Quinn and I —”
“Your friends can wait ten minutes,” says CardaMom, nudging Catalpa back into her chair with one finger.
“Are we still on for a starlight hike tonight?” Wood asks PapaDum.
He nods, finger to lips, and gestures to Sumac.
“This week I’ve been — I was curious about homes,” Sumac begins a little unevenly, and has to clear her throat.
“Oh, like cross
-culturally?” asks PopCorn. “High-rises versus igloos, that sort of thing?”
She hesitates, fiddling with the projector so the first image — a sleek modern building against an orangey evening sky — hits the white wall of the Mess. The last slideshow she did, of the childhood photos, went pear-shaped, but this time she’s totally prepared. “It turns out, it just so happens, that there are some really, uh, world-class residential facilities with lots of facilities” — she said that already — “I mean, lots of stuff for people who are … not so young anymore.” Her gaze touching down on Grumps, who’s still working on his second helping of lasagna. “Right here in Toronto,” she adds, to prove that the Lotterys could easily visit Grumps. If he wanted them to. “For instance, here’s a great example called Sunset Vista Residence, where nurses come in round the clock. Only if you need something, obviously, otherwise they don’t,” she throws in his direction, remembering how much it annoys him even to hear Lotterys talking on the stairs at seven in the morning. She clicks onto the next image, a blue-tiled indoor pool. “You can swim; there’s a resistance section where the water actually pushes against your muscles to strengthen them. And here we see the, the pergola in the garden.” She’s not sure she’s pronouncing the trellis thing right.
“Sumac,” says PapaDum in an odd voice.
“Pergola, sorry,” she says, rushing on because she can’t stop for questions, she hasn’t made any of her really important points yet. “The mission statement of Sunset Vista says, uh, it’s about living your life to the fullest in a homelike environment. You get whatever help you want, like with …” Here she’s meant to read from the list that starts bathing, dressing, eating, but she falters, because she can’t imagine Grumps standing for anyone treating him like a baby. “They offer a personalized package of assistance,” Sumac quotes instead — she can’t help picturing that as a huge present with a bow on top — “which means you pick your bits, your favorite amenities,” she says, dredging up the word from her memory. “Like, you don’t have to have the deep tissue aromatherapy massage if you don’t like people pawing you.” Wasn’t that what Grumps called it the other day, pawing, when CardaMom offered to rub cream on his sunburned shoulders? “You can play euchre instead, or billiards, or you can sightsee….” Should that be see sights?
“Tsi’t-ha, let me stop you there.” That’s CardaMom.
Sumac can’t find where she is in her notes, but she knows she’s got a long way to go, so she mustn’t stop or even take a second to say why she’s not stopping. Wood’s got his hand over his eyes, she notices, and Catalpa’s mouth is twisted. Sumac just needs to reach one picture of Sunset Vista that looks so fabulously luxurious, they’ll all see what she means. “There’s lots of individual privacy and a special memory care unit for” — her nerve fails her on dementia — “what you, what lots of seniors have got in their heads,” she says in Grumps’s direction, but not meeting his gaze. It only strikes her now, wouldn’t stashing the confused oldies side by side in their own unit make them even more confused? She’s flicking through the slides too quickly, and none of these beaming, silver-haired people look anything like Grumps. Nobody’s shown with a cigarette; Sumac couldn’t find any old folks’ home that even mentioned smoking. Without looking at him directly she can see that PopCorn’s face is a mask. It’s all somehow going wrong, horribly wrong, Sumac knows, but she can’t fix it by stopping in the middle, she just has to push on to the end and use all her powers of persuasion, just like Sic. “Look, a movie theater with surround sound!” No, that’s the chapel. She flicks back two slides, desperate to find the movie theater, but all she can find is a tour bus and a picture of a cake stand.
“Sumac!” PapaDum’s voice booms.
She reads aloud the captions on the photos in a gabble. “Excursions to Niagara Falls. Enhanced retirement living. Come relax with us, because you deserve —”
Snap: Sic, leaning across the table, has shut the laptop. The wall goes blank.
A screech from Grumps’s chair as he shoves it back. He gives Sumac a baleful stare, then turns it on the whole family. “Believe me, ye couldn’t long to see the back of me more than I long to see the back of ye!”
He crashes out into the Hall of Mirrors. Then they hear the door of the Grumpery slam behind him.
CardaMom breaks the awful hush: “Sumac, how could you?”
Her voice comes out in a squeak. “I was only trying to help.”
“I find that hard to believe,” says MaxiMum.
Sumac struggles to keep the tears in her eye sockets.
“Did you not realize how much it would hurt his feelings?” asks PapaDum.
“Yeah,” says Catalpa, “how would you feel if we stuck you in some institution just because you’re über irritating?”
“I only thought” — Sumac gasps for breath — “if I could find him a home that’s almost like a real one, somewhere he’d prefer to live than Camelottery, without all the things that bug him so much, without all of us — because he doesn’t want to stay here —”
She looks from face to face. None of them can deny that.
“But maybe he wants us to want him to stay,” says PopCorn in a voice so flat that it doesn’t sound like his.
It was cruel, what Sumac did: She can suddenly see that now. How can she have spent all week preparing her presentation and not noticed the mean-mindedness of it? What kind of a blundering idiot is she?
Now her tears spill down, and she flees from the room as if she’s three instead of nine.
* * *
When various parents come up to the attic to knock at Sumac’s door, she shouts, “Go away,” and buries her sticky face under the pillow again.
Sic doesn’t ask permission, he just walks in. “Poor duck,” he says, and sits down on her butt.
Sumac wiggles to shake him off.
“Oh, what a lovely cushion,” he says, adjusting his weight. “A little bony, maybe … could do with some reupholstering … a bit more duck down …”
“Reupholster yourself,” she says, her voice muffledly.
He bounces up and down.
She groans but doesn’t mind, oddly enough. When you’re this miserable, having a heavy weight press you flat feels right.
“Seriously, Smackeroo,” says her brother. “Have you figured out why everyone got so mad at you?”
Sumac cringes. “I know I know I know, I was stupid and horrible, I don’t need to hear it all over again!” She twists sideways till Sic tips off her.
He’s shaking his head. “Wouldn’t we all heave a massive, collective sigh of relief if the dude volunteered to move to some spa-type retirement villa?”
She blinks at him.
“What you got in trouble for was saying it out loud.”
“Yeah, well, I wish I hadn’t.”
“You think MaxiMum’s enjoying having to talk him into cutting his dinosaurish toenails? Even CardaMom, with her blind spot about family —”
Sumac is confused. “Blind spot like in a car?”
“Right, the bit you can’t see clearly: She’s all about family. And PapaDum can’t stand the guy — probably hopes he’ll snuff it in his sleep one of these hot nights.”
“You’re sick, Sic.” She’s grinning behind her hand.
He shrugs and fluffs out his Afro. “I’ve been mulling it over, and the thing of it is, it’s … payback time!”
Sometimes when her brother talks like one of his video games, Sumac has no idea what he means. “Payback for what?”
“PopCorn had scaly eczema and projectile vomiting till he was two, remember?”
“He’s probably exaggerating,” says Sumac.
“Well, of course, doesn’t he always? But still. If your folks get you to eighteen in one piece, you owe them something,” says Sic. “So PopCorn has to be loyal to his dad, and we’re loyal to PopCorn: links in a chain.”
The kind that keeps a prisoner shackled to a wall, Sumac thinks.
“Anyway, cheer up, fello
w mutt. It’s all good.”
“No it’s not,” she tells him.
“It’s Oak’s birthday tomorrow. Let the wild rumpus start!” Sic quotes.
“Yeah,” says Sumac, but not feeling it.
Sumac remembers Oak’s first birthday, when they dressed him up as an acorn in that velvety brown costume with the matching cap and invited everyone from his physiotherapist and his and Brian’s caseworker, to all the relations within driving distance, and even the babies from his music games class … though Oak did fall asleep over his bottle before most of them arrived.
No party this year. The parents say things are busy enough at the moment, which Sumac knows is a euphemism for Grumps. Since her mortifying presentation on old folks’ homes yesterday, she’s avoided everybody’s eyes, but especially his.
She taps on the door of the Asp Pit, which has a picture of a huge snake with Aspen’s grinning face.
Aspen’s lying on her back in the sea of Legos that flows from wall to wall with her legs hooked over her elbows, talking to some small, complicated flying machine she’s making. “What?”
“The plan’s on hold for now,” whispers Sumac.
“What plan?”
She grunts in exasperation. “The plan to get Grumps to ask to go live somewhere else.”
Aspen’s face clears and she rocks a little on her spine. “Oh, I wasn’t doing that anymore anyway.”
“Why not?” asks Sumac.
“Slate likes him.”
She frowns at Aspen. “How do you know?”
“Well, I left him in his bed this morning —”
“You left Slate in bed?”
“In Grumps’s bed, duh! And I listened outside the door, I thought it would be hilarious, but actually Grumps just said, Who have we here? and when I looked in a few minutes later he was tickling Slate’s tummy, and I had to do a big fake like, Oo, is that where you got to?”
Sumac grits her teeth. That rat is such a sucker for tickles.
So she’s totally alone, she realizes as she stomps downstairs. Despite what Sic told her last night about how everybody would prefer it if Grumps left voluntarily, Sumac is clearly the only one who’s having trouble putting up with him. She always thought she was pretty kind and tolerant, but it turns out she’s the sourpuss of the family. Not Fragrant but Poison Sumac.
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