“Nice little puff of breeze,” he says, stretching, but all Sumac can feel is sticky.
“Most fun thing about today?” PopCorn asks, bouncing Oak on his lap.
“I spotted a peregrine falcon,” says Wood.
“Wow!” PopCorn’s playing Horsey with Oak now, jogging him along till Oak slides off PopCorn’s leg and dangles from it like a monkey.
“More than a hundred people showed up for our Green Your Home info session at the library,” says PapaDum.
PopCorn beams at him proudly.
PapaDum’s sort of a reformed bad guy, because he used to run huge construction projects that turned fields into strip malls, but now he uses his powers for good.
Aspen pretends to be gutted. “What, that was funner than the time you spent with us?” she asks PapaDum.
“Hey, that’s one of the pluses of a four-parent family,” says PopCorn. “We each get to spend some time being something other than a dad or mom.”
PapaDum grins at Aspen. “But brushing your hair was definitely the most relaxing thing I did.”
That’s the only time Aspen sits still, when PapaDum’s getting all her tangles out with what he claims is his magic brush.
“My funnest thing, I guess, was … acing my Rules of the Road test!” Sic does a little victory dance in his chair. “Now I’ve started a program on state-of-the-art defensive driving techniques. Backing up, checking your blind spot —”
Sumac peers into her brother’s chocolate-brown eyes. “I didn’t know you had a blind spot.”
“All drivers do,” says PapaDum, jerking his thumb behind him, to the left. “It’s the bit you can’t see in your mirror.”
“Changing lanes, braking smoothly” — Sic’s large right sneaker rotates and paws the air — “staggering in traffic …”
“When you say a program,” says PapaDum, “do you mean actual lessons?”
“Well, self-taught,” says Sic. “It’s virtual driving software.”
PopCorn rolls his eyes and slides down in his deck chair.
“But it’d be totally legal for me to practice driving for real if there was an adult beside me,” Sic assures him.
“An imaginary adult, like Mario?” asks Wood. “Because there’s no real adult who’d let you behind the wheel of an actual car.”
“Given enough time,” Sic quotes, “a stream can split a mountain.”
“Yeah, maybe you’ll be driving by the time you’re Grumps’s age,” says Wood.
“Where is he, by the way?” asks PopCorn, looking around.
“Brian took him for a walk in the Ravine,” says PapaDum. “The creek’s dry, but …” He rubs his beard as their eyes meet.
PopCorn stands up, Oak on his hip. “Maybe we’ll go see how they’re —”
That’s when they hear the wailing, and Brian comes tearing down the Wild in her shorts.
PopCorn tries to be heard over the shrieks. “What’s the matter, honey?”
But they can all see the streaky rash on Brian’s arms and chest, the red bumps already swelling. Poison ivy! Sumac hisses in sympathy. That’s going to turn into weeping blisters.
Grumps strides up the garden behind Brian. “Got the bairn out the minute I could.”
“Thanks, Iain,” PapaDum tells him. “Hose!”
PopCorn’s already running for it. “Have to wash the resin off, Brian, the sticky poison.”
She shrieks under the cold water.
“Here, boots off so I can spray your feet,” PapaDum’s telling Grumps.
“Dad! Your feet,” says PopCorn.
“Don’t scratch,” PapaDum advises the old man, tugging off his steel-capped boots. “The thing is to rinse it off and then sit in a lukewarm bath.”
“Let’s get your socks into a garbage bag, Dad.”
“I’m not throwing out my socks,” says Grumps in a shocked tone.
“We just need to wash them.”
“Those are perfectly good socks.”
“What about yogurt? Or chamomile tea,” says PopCorn, yanking off Brian’s shorts and underwear. “That can be soothing.”
PapaDum snorts. “Hydrocortisone and antihistamines are what they need. I’ll check the medicine cabinet.”
“Socks, Dad,” pleads PopCorn.
“The boy,” says Grumps, staring.
“Wood?” says Sumac, looking around.
“The wee baldy one.” Grumps is pointing at naked Brian, who’s shuddering under the hose. “He’s a girl.”
A silence, which Brian breaks. “I not a girl!”
Aspen titters. “Didn’t you know?” she asks Grumps.
He gives her a fierce look.
Sumac’s staggered. How can the man have spent nearly two weeks here thinking Brian’s a boy?
“At the moment, Brian’s preferring not to be called that,” murmurs PopCorn.
The stubbled ridges where Grumps’s eyebrows are starting to grow back go up. “Not to be called a girl?”
“Not a girl,” shrieks Brian.
But then again, Sumac realizes, the Lotterys are a big mob, and they talk a lot and often all at the same time. Grumps must have heard she sometimes, but not known that it was this particular bald four-year-old being talked about.
“Why did you name her Brian, for the love of God?” he demands.
“It was actually Briar,” says Sumac, “but she changed it when she was three.”
“Ye are all out of your tiny minds,” says Grumps, and stomps away to the house in his dripping socks.
* * *
After the moms get back, Wood proposes a game in the Ravine called Friend or Foe, so that nobody else will get hurt this summer. (Grumps doesn’t answer when Aspen knocks on his door to ask if he wants to come along.)
Wood points to a jagged leaf.
“Nettle, foe,” shouts Brian. She can’t reach her shins to scratch her rashes because she’s got her fire truck on, so she rubs them against a tree.
“Mm, what’s this delicious little friend?” asks Sic, leaning over some orange globes.
“Let me taste.” Aspen reaches for one.
“Foe! You’re so dead,” Wood tells her. “That’s Jerusalem cherry.”
“Aspen not dead,” says Brian, a little uncertainly.
“This one’s a strawberry, totally friendly,” Sumac tells her, swallowing one.
“Who’s the leader of this game?” demands Wood.
“It’s not a military expedition,” murmurs CardaMom.
“This is life-or-death stuff, Mother.”
“Whoops, should I have pretended she didn’t know a strawberry when she saw one?” asks Sumac.
“I wants strawberry,” says Brian.
“And what in the world could that one be?” asks Aspen, wide-eyed. “It’s black and it’s a berry….” She drops it in Brian’s palm. “Could it just ever so possibly be our friend blackberry?”
“Don’t want blackberry.” Brian hurls it back in the bush.
“I’d have eaten that,” Sumac complains.
“I want strawberry!” Brian bangs on the cardboard sides of her truck.
“Stay calm if you want to stay with the gang,” CardaMom reminds her. “What about elderberry?” She points to a small dark fruit.
“Don’t tell this loser crew the names,” Wood rebukes her. “They need to know the plants by sight, for survival.”
“You mean in the End Times?” asks Sic, sniggering. “When you, with all your wood lore, rise to be boy leader of the handful of Torontonians left alive?”
Wood aims a karate kick at him, but Sic jumps away.
“You mock your little brother now,” says PopCorn to Sic, “but come the Apocalypse, you’ll be begging to get into his fortified compound.”
“So is elderberry a friend or foe?” asks Sumac.
CardaMom makes a kinda gesture with her hand. “Like beans, it turns friendly when you cook it.”
They’re heading down the slope of the Ravine now. The path’s still a bit
crumbly from the flash floods earlier in the summer. “Leaf of three, let it be,” chants Brian balefully, waggling her finger at some low green leaves with red berries.
“Actually, that one’s a friend called fragrant sumac,” MaxiMum tells her. “See, the three stems are all the same length. With poison ivy the middle one’s longer.”
Brian scratches one of her bumpy legs with her other foot. “Leaf of three be my foe!”
Her little sister does recognize leafs of three, Sumac thinks with a cold sensation. Could Brian have run into the poison ivy to save Grumps, not vice versa?
“Anyone remember how to tell poison sumac from fragrant?” asks MaxiMum.
“White fruit that sticks up,” Wood tells the group.
“White, yeah, but it dangles down.” MaxiMum makes her hands droop and puts on a monster face.
Sumac feels a tiny stab of pleasure at the sight of Wood’s expression.
“By the way, young ones,” says CardaMom as they head back up toward their property line, “new rules.”
“How many new rules, and for what?” Sumac pulls her notepad out of her shorts to take them down.
“Just one. Your grandfather’s not able to be in charge of the little ones,” says MaxiMum, “so if Brian’s with him, or Oak, a teenager or an adult needs to be there too.”
“Does it matter?” asks Sumac.
Everyone stares, and she feels herself turning red. “I only mean, if he might be going tomorrow, or whenever the results come in —”
“Going where?” asks MaxiMum.
“Like, leaving,” says Sumac, faltering. “Back to Faro.”
PopCorn says, in a hoarse voice, “Cherub, my dad’s never going back to Faro.”
What, never? How can they be sure of that? Sumac blinks. “But he said you said, two weeks and you’d see. Two weeks is the last day of July; that’s tomorrow.”
“I don’t think anybody would have said anything as specific as two weeks,” CardaMom tells her.
“A couple of weeks, then,” Sumac growls. “He marked it on his calendar. The flower calendar in his room, with the circle around the date?”
Blank looks all around.
“You’re the best noticer in the family,” says CardaMom.
“He said he was perfectly minty” — Sumac suddenly can’t retrieve the phrase — “some Latin words that mean perfectly solid in his mind, and it’d all been a big mistake.”
“If you’re such a good noticer,” scoffs Wood, “how come you haven’t noticed the guy’s brains are fried?”
“Wood,” protests CardaMom.
“Scrambled!” He mimes whipping eggs. “He put his sunglasses in the microwave.”
“Did he cook them?” asks PopCorn, horrified.
Wood shakes his head. “I stopped him just in time.”
“He can still play chess,” Sumac argues confusedly.
“Did he win, though?” says Sic.
“He — we stopped the game because he called me a cheater. He plays by different rules.” Even as Sumac says it, she can hear what it sounds like: bogus.
“Meaning, he’s forgotten the rules,” says MaxiMum. “I’m sorry, Sumac, but his test results are all back, and they show a lot of cognitive deficits. Gaps,” she says. (For once, without telling the kids to look it up.)
“He doesn’t remember who the prime minister is,” says PopCorn miserably.
“Who cares?” says Aspen. “I don’t know that.”
“Me neither,” says Sumac. That’s a lie, actually. Of course Sumac knows who the boss of Canada is, but most nine-year-olds wouldn’t. Like, at the playground the other day, Isabella and Liam were sure it was Barack Obama.
“Will his brain bits grow back, like his eyebrows?” Aspen asks.
The parents all look at each other, then shake their heads.
A tear runs down Sumac’s cheek, startling her. It’s not about Grumps. It’s because this whole summer’s down the toilet, and she wishes it was over already.
The next day, the one marked on Grumps’s calendar, the parents have a record-breakingly long Dull Conversation — around the Trampoline, so Oak can entertain himself by rolling around on it. Then the moms go around the corner to grab falafel and bring it back for lunch while the dads explain the situation to the old man.
Sumac is huddled on the stairs with all her siblings, listening to the fight in the Grumpery. There’s nothing dormant about their grandfather anymore: He’s an erupting volcano now, spewing out gas and ash and lava in all directions. “Robbers,” he roars.
Oak is practicing stairs. He prefers to crawl down rather than up, because then gravity’s his friend, but he hasn’t factored in the face-plants, so his sibs keep having to scoop him up at the last minute and flip him around so he’s heading upward again. Luckily he finds this funny rather than annoying.
“Abductors!” screeches the old man.
“LOL,” Opal screams from the Mess. “LOL!”
Sumac feels so sick, she doesn’t think she’ll be able to manage any falafel.
“Where the doctors?” asks Brian puzzledly.
“Abductors,” Sic tells her.
“Like, kidnappers,” says Wood.
Brian’s eyes cross slightly. “Where the kidnappers?”
It’s too hard to explain, so nobody does.
“What if the neighbors call the police?” asks Aspen.
Catalpa groans. “I bet it was Mrs. Zhao who phoned Social Services last year because of your bruises.”
That was the most embarrassing moment of Sumac’s life so far, when the social worker turned up to ask how Aspen had got so many aspendents.
“Ye take my car away,” Grumps thunders now, “hustle me onto a plane, trap me in this weirdy commune! Elder abuse, that’s what it is.”
“Poor Grumps,” murmurs Catalpa.
Sumac scowls at her. Wasn’t her big sister the one who objected most loudly to the dads and moms shipping in some random old guy in the first place? So why is Catalpa posing as all nicey-nicey now?
PopCorn’s voice, from the Grumpery: “Dad, do you remember what the doctor said about —”
“You,” the old man interrupts, “sitting in judgment on my sanity, I like that! All daubed with tattoos, with your oddball lifestyle and your pack of mongrels —”
“Don’t speak to your son that way!”
The kids all stiffen because that’s PapaDum, sounding angrier than they’ve ever heard him.
Oak lets out a squeak. Sic blows little raspberries on his head.
PopCorn’s professional counselor voice, all low and lulling; Sumac can’t make out what he’s saying.
“But we’ve only got one mongrel, that’s Diamond. She’s not a pack,” says Aspen. “Maybe Grumps thinks Kipper from the apartment building is ours? But he’s nearly all yellow Labrador.”
“Us,” hisses Sumac. “We’re the mongrels.”
“Don’t sweat it,” says Sic with a shrug. “Mutts make the best dogs.”
“But —”
“It’s a fact: We’re a raggle-taggle, multiculti crew. Grumps was raised on racism, homophobia, all that jazz. Nineteen thirties ring a bell at all? Hitler? Ex-ter-min-ate!” Sic adds in a robotic voice.
But Sumac’s seen ninety-year-olds boogieing on floats in the Pride Parade. “Yeah, well, he’s had decades and decades to grow out of being like that. At this rate he’ll still be narrow-minded when he’s a hundred.”
Silence falls as the kids consider that.
“I’m so hungry I could eat my own fist,” says Wood.
“I’ll run down the street and see if they’re coming,” offers Aspen.
“Sh,” says Sumac, listening hard, because the voices in the Grumpery are rising again.
“We’ve taken you in, Iain,” PapaDum’s saying, “and in return, you could have the common courtesy to —”
“Who asked you to take me in, Saint Gandhi?” roars Grumps. “Didn’t want to be taken in, did I? Wanted to stay right where I was
!”
And then the front door scrapes open and MaxiMum calls up, “Lunch,” so the kids all clatter down the stairs, Wood lugging Oak over his shoulder, firefighter-style.
* * *
Grumps spends all Wednesday and Thursday in his room, giving the Lotterys the silent treatment. He still gets on Sumac’s nerves even when he’s out of sight.
On Friday morning, she and Aspen are down in the Saw Pit making a meter-wide mud, twig, and pebble model of Toronto in 1954. Of course Sumac’s doing most of the work, but Aspen can concentrate on things surprisingly well if they’re morbid or disgusting. Once his sisters are done, Wood’s promised to help them re-create Hurricane Hazel and the flood that killed eighty-one people across the city.
When the whine of a drill cuts through the air, Sumac follows it upstairs to the Grumpery, where she finds PapaDum up a stepladder drilling a hole in the ceiling. Their grandfather isn’t there, but the room has his musty oldie smell. His cases have disappeared, which gets Sumac excited for a minute, but then she figures out that he must have unpacked them.
“Is he …” She stops herself from saying gone, because that’s just wishful thinking. “Out?”
PapaDum nods. “PopCorn took him to the shoe store for orthotics to make his feet comfier.”
Why doesn’t Grumps just swap his steel-toe boots for sandals, Sumac wonders? “What are you doing?”
“Putting an exhaust fan in the ceiling to suck smoke out.”
“But smoking’s against the rules.”
A sigh. “Well, this would be what’s called an accommodation, beta.”
That confuses her. “Isn’t the whole house an accommodation, because people live in it?”
“The word also means making space for someone.” The drill screams, then PapaDum goes on: “Bending a rule, meeting halfway, splitting the difference.”
“So Grumps is allowed to smoke now?” Sumac asks, squeaky with outrage.
“The fan should keep it from spreading.”
Accommodation means that you cave, basically. (Like giving Brian chocolate mousse after she’s had a tantrum and banged her head on the table.) Splitting the difference, so nobody’s going to be happy: The Lotterys would rather not have foul toxins leaking through their house, and Grumps would prefer to live somewhere he could smoke whenever he liked.