CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
ONCE UPON A TIME
CHAPTER 1: THE DORMANT GRANDFATHER
CHAPTER 2: THE TRIP
CHAPTER 3: DAY ONE
CHAPTER 4: THE PRESENT
CHAPTER 5: ROOM FOR ANOTHER
CHAPTER 6: GUIDE DOG
CHAPTER 7: COMPOS MENTIS
CHAPTER 8: FRIEND OR FOE
CHAPTER 9: ACCOMMODATION
CHAPTER 10: MARBLES
CHAPTER 11: LOSEDED … AND FINDED
CHAPTER 12: TAGS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COPYRIGHT
THE LOTTERYS PLUS ONE
IS DEDICATED TO MY MOTHER,
FRANCES PATRICIA RUTLEDGE DONOGHUE,
WITH LOVE AND THANKS
FOR ALL THE CONVERSATIONS.
a man from Delhi and a man from Yukon fell in love, and so did a woman from Jamaica and a Mohawk woman. The two couples became best friends and had a baby together. When they won the lottery, they gave up their jobs and found a big old house where their family could learn and grow … and grow some more.
Now Sumac Lottery (age nine) is the fifth of seven kids, all named after trees. With their four parents and five pets, they fit perfectly in the Toronto home they call Camelottery.
But the one thing in life that never changes … is that sooner or later things change.
Only eight people at breakfast today, which feels weird. (Sumac’s three eldest sibs have stayed on at Camp Jagged Falls for a wilderness trip.) But she has been quite enjoying the extra space. Even though Camelottery has thirty-two rooms, you’d be surprised how often all the Lotterys seem to wind up trying to use the same toilet at the same time.
Right now, Sumac’s putting blueberries on her oatmeal in the Mess — which is Lottery-speak for their yellow-walled kitchen, because a mess is the place armies eat — and no one’s jogged her elbow yet: amazing. She’s made sure to be on the window side of the long table, facing the same way as her sister Aspen, who bobs up and down on her exercise ball so much that if Sumac sits across from her she feels seasick. Three of the parents are blah-blahing about the watermelon glut at the community garden, but Sumac’s not really listening because she’s busy planning the One-to-One Lottafun she and PopCorn are going to start today.
In May she and CardaMom spent a week on Haudenosaunee longhouses, and they built a mini one behind the Trampoline for Sumac’s dolls to camp in. But this is going to be even more excellent because (a) it’s all about the weird world of ancient Mesopotamia, and (b) PopCorn really plunges into things. Like their best One-to-One ever, when he and Sumac studied the history of weaving and how it led to the invention of computers, and they rounded up a bunch of kids to make a gigantic tapestry celebrating the Olympics all along the playground fence.
“What you making of blueberries?” Brian asks Sumac. (Her youngest sister used to be Briar, but last year, when she was three, she announced she was Brian.)
“A heptagon. That means seven sides.” Sumac nudges a berry into line.
“Did we ask what a heptagon is, smarty-pants?” At ten and a half, Aspen considers it her job to crush Sumac sometimes when her sister’s vocabulary gets too big for its britches.
“Mines be a face,” says Brian.
“With three eyes?” Sumac examines Brian’s bowl.
“Why not three eyes?”
“It’s fine,” says Sumac, “it’s just not the normal number.”
“Normal, boremal,” chants Aspen, boinging higher on her ball, “peculiar’s coolier.”
Decisive, Brian plops another blueberry into the oatmeal. “Four eyes, because I four.” Blueberries also make a straight line for a mouth; Brian doesn’t smile unless it’s a special occasion.
Her little sister’s head is a pink-white golf ball, Sumac decides — with her neck the tee it’s resting on. When the Lotterys got hair lice yet again, back in May, Brian fought off any parent who came near her with that foul shampoo, till Sumac offered to give her buzzed hair the same as PopCorn’s. (Even though Sumac’s only nine, she’s the family barber, because she’s the most accurate and undistractable.) Now Brian wants to keep her hair this short all the days because it means strangers don’t call her a girl.
Oak, lolling in his high chair, does a grunty sort of chuckle.
Aspen grins at their baby brother and stops bouncing long enough to drop another three blueberries onto the plastic plate that’s Velcroed to his tray.
Sumac holds up her spoon to see if being buzzed bald would suit her too, but of course her reflection’s upside down, because the spoon’s concave—like a cave—so it bends the light rays. She flips it around to see herself right way up on the back. Sumac happens to have more or less the same face bits as her eldest sister Catalpa, even though their ancestors come from different parts of the globe: smooth black hair and brown eyes. But it’s only on Catalpa that it all adds up to beautiful, which is unfair. Sumac sticks out her tongue at her reflection and starts on her oatmeal.
PopCorn hurries into the Mess, holding his phone to his ear. “Sure, of course, the next flight.” He must be talking to a stranger, because he sounds all serious and grown-up. Usually he puts on funny voices because he’s the Court Jester of Camelottery.
PapaDum, ladling out seconds, raises his bushy eyebrows to ask what it’s about. PapaDum’s fifty-nine — that’s the oldest in the whole family — so his eyebrows are getting monstrous, but he claims they’re the right size to match his beard.
PopCorn nods at him, not smiling — which again makes him seem not himself. He slides the phone into the back pocket of the shorts he made from cutting the legs off his favorite jeans after a chemistry experiment. “Got to go see your grandfather, poppets,” he announces, sitting down between Aspen and CardaMom. Then he winces as if that hurt his butt and fishes the phone out again.
“Up to heaven?” Brian asks, big-eyed.
“No, that’s my dad you’re thinking of,” MaxiMum tells her.
Aspen lets out a snigger.
Sumac glares at her sister, because it’s not funny that their grandfather from Jamaica’s dead, even if it did happen before most of them were alive.
Aspen can’t help it, though; she was born sniggering. And MaxiMum doesn’t get offended. (She says she’s not naturally calm and rational, like Spock in Star Trek; it’s from doing all that yoga.)
So PopCorn must be talking about PapaDum’s father, then. “But wouldn’t you just take the train if you’re visiting Dada Ji in Oakville?” asks Sumac.
“I wish!” PopCorn’s transferred his phone to the tiny pocket on the arm of his T-shirt, where it sticks out and waggles as he spoons up his breakfast.
“Duh,” Aspen tells her, “he must be flying to Montreal to see Baba on the reserve.”
“Not PapaDum’s dad, nor CardaMom’s,” says PopCorn in an oddly flat voice. “Mine.”
After a pause, CardaMom says, “You know: Iain, who PopCorn goes to see in Yukon every now and then?”
Sumac checks her mental files. “No he doesn’t.”
PopCorn’s eyes are on his spoon as it hunts a blueberry. “Well, more like once in a blue moon.”
“That grandfather’s not a real one,” says Aspen, lifting her feet to balance precariously on her ball. “He’s just in stories about making you chop up lots of kindling when you were small.”
Which sounds more like an evil sorcerer than a grandfather to Sumac.
“Oh, he’s real enough,” says PopCorn, licking maple syrup off one knuckle. “He just hasn’t been much of a grandfather.”
“To be fair,” says CardaMom, “he’s never even met the kids.”
To be fair is one of her pet phrases, because she used to
be a lawyer — the fighting-for-justice kind.
Under the table, their brown mutt, Diamond, lets out a bark for no apparent reason. She’s been pining ever since the five biggest kids went to camp, and she won’t cheer up till Wood’s home.
Oak’s trying to eat his bib. Sumac gently tugs it out of his mouth. So this fourth grandfather has been nonactivated till now, she thinks. Dormant, like a volcano. “How come you only visit your dad once in a blue moon?”
“Yukon’s, ah, pretty far away,” says CardaMom.
MaxiMum gives her a look. “Let’s not be euphemistic.”
Sumac asks, “What’s —”
“Look it up,” says MaxiMum, as always, because she believes people should educate themselves. “It starts e-u.”
Sumac frowns. “Don’t you like your own dad?” she asks PopCorn.
“Oh, Sumac, Queen of the Pertinent Question.” He leans over to press her nose like a buzzer.
“Is pertinent like impertinent, like rude?” Aspen’s eager for it not to be her getting criticized for bad manners, for once. “I am looking it up,” she goes on, before MaxiMum can tell her to. “I’m opening up the dictionary right now….” She’s got MaxiMum by the ears and is pretending to read her short curls.
MaxiMum laughs, then puts on a computer-generated voice. “Pertinent, adjective: highly relevant to what’s being talked about.”
“He means Sumac’s a hammer that always hits the nail on the head,” says CardaMom fondly.
Sumac’s not sure she likes the sound of that. Though she supposes it’s better than being a hammer that hits the nail the wrong way and crumples it.
“Anyway, what did he say, hon?” PapaDum asks PopCorn.
“No, it was a nurse who called,” PopCorn tells him. “To tell me Dad set his house on fire.”
The other parents stare, and Aspen lets out an automatic burst of laughter.
“Just a small one, and he managed to put it out before the volunteer firefighters turned up.”
“Poor Iain,” cries CardaMom.
“Minor burns, that’s about it, from the sound of it,” says PopCorn.
“He play with candles?” asks Brian sternly.
PopCorn squeezes her small knee, which always has old Band-Aids dangling from it. “My dad doesn’t really play. Well, anyway, so I have to get to Whitehorse today, if there’s a seat, then drive to Faro….”
“Hang on,” says Sumac.
“Bring back presents?” asks Brian.
“Of course,” PopCorn tells her, rubbing her fuzzy-peach head.
“And not New Agey ones made of braided grass, like last time,” Aspen warns him.
“I’m putting you on the one-fourteen via Vancouver,” murmurs CardaMom, her fingers busy on the screen of her phone. (Sumac’s noticed that it’s nearly always the adults who claim to have some urgent reason to break the no electronics at meals rule.) With her long skirts and gray-black hair down to below her butt, CardaMom can look like she’s from the nineteenth century, but actually she’s the techiest of the parents.
“Bless you,” says PopCorn, picking up the coffeepot and filling his mug with a slosh.
“Hang on,” says Sumac to him again.
But the bless you makes Brian do a pretend sneeze, so of course Aspen does a bigger one. Then Opal, on his perch, produces a parrot version of a sneeze, and Oak finds that so hilarious, he coughs most of a blueberry back up onto his tray.
“I think laughing may be your best talent, Oaky-doke,” MaxiMum tells him with a thumbs-up.
Oak tries to do one back at her, except he forgets to let his thumb out of his fingers, so it looks like he’s shaking his small fist in wrath.
MaxiMum wipes his hands, his face and double chins and neck, and the tray of his high chair. (The only thing she says she misses about working in a lab is that being a neat freak was her job, not something her loved ones mocked her for.)
“Can I get down,” Aspen asks from the door, “because Slate’s in my sock drawer and he misses me?”
“You haven’t eaten anything, beta,” PapaDum points out. (That’s the pet name his parents called him when he was growing up in India.)
She pulls a face. “One more spoon?”
“Three.”
Aspen runs back and shovels up her oatmeal.
“Hang on.” Sumac nearly shouts it at PopCorn this time. “What about our One-to-One Lottafun?”
He blinks at her.
“You and me are doing ancient Mesopotamia, remember?”
“Sorry, sweet patoot, it’ll have to be another week.”
“Sumac, you could cycle to the market with me and learn, let’s see, nutrition and budgeting, then in the afternoon we’ll can peaches,” offers PapaDum.
She scowls. One-to-Ones with PapaDum always boil down to the cooking or home repairs he was going to do anyway.
“This afternoon I’m going fern hunting with the smalls,” says MaxiMum. “You could plan our hike route, put together a photo chart of the ten most common ferns in Toronto….”
Sumac sees red. “You said you and me would be Mesopotamians all week,” she tells PopCorn, “and put on a show with costumes and ancient snacks, and now you’re going to jet off to the other side of the continent instead!”
“Sumac,” says MaxiMum crisply. “It sounds like your grandfather needs a visit, and it can’t wait.”
She chews her lip. “Then bring me.”
“Sure,” says PopCorn with a shrug.
The other three adults glare.
“Whoops,” he says, slapping his hand, “I mean, let me consult with my coparents.”
“Not fair if Sumac flies to Yukon when she’s only nine,” yowls Aspen.
“Nine-going-on-nineteen, PapaDum called me the other day,” Sumac tells her, “and my reading age is thirteen.”
“The grandfather won’t need you to read to him,” says Aspen scathingly.
“Right after a fire doesn’t sound like the best moment to meet PopCorn’s dad,” says PapaDum.
“No, it is,” Sumac insists, “because two of us will be twice as cheering-up as one. I’ll be totally helpful and mature.”
“Come on,” PopCorn tells the others, “travel’s educational. Aren’t we the family that likes to say why not?”
“Two seats it is, then,” says CardaMom, tapping her phone.
Aspen lets out an outraged gasp.
“Don’t tell me you actually want to go too,” says MaxiMum.
“Well, no, but I should get something. Twenty-four hours of Minecraft?”
“One hour.”
“Deal,” says Aspen, and slips out of the Mess before anyone can object.
Diamond barks again.
“Woof,” cries Oak from his high chair. He says that for Topaz and Quartz too, and even Slate: He seems to mean any four-footed animal.
But the Lotterys all clap and woof back at him because it’s Oak’s only word so far, and Brian’s so proud of teaching it to him.
* * *
Grrr: PopCorn says he’s too busy preparing for their trip to come to the exhibition at the Uh-Oh. But he promises Sumac she can teach him all about ancient Mesopotamia on the plane this afternoon instead.
The outing’s by streetcar, subway, then foot. (The Lotterys are way too green to have a car, because it messes up the planet.) Even though it’s just six of the eleven of them — because MaxiMum’s at the community garden dealing with an infestation of tiny bugs called thrips — they take up the whole sidewalk. Aspen jogs backward ahead of the rest, making string figures. At Camp Jagged Falls, the kids each finger-knitted their own cat’s cradle loop from Miley the Sheep’s wool, but Aspen came home obsessed. It’s a great fidget for her hands, though, which is useful because she’s not allowed to bring Slate out in public since the Great Movie Theater Disaster. (Her rat frightens people an awful lot considering he’s only twenty-seven centimeters long, not counting his tail.)
Sumac reads How to Betray a Dragon’s Hero as she walks, becau
se she doesn’t like to waste time.
“I tired,” wails Brian.
Sumac looks up and offers to play I Spy. “I spy something red … something stripy … something yucky you’re about to step on!”
Brian yelps and leaps over it. “I tired again.”
So then PapaDum pulls her along with the Invisible Rope, which always helps for a while. But what works best with Brian is letting her push the Oakmobile — Oak’s huge stroller — which is hard to get up steps but handy to hang bags on. Pushing it must be tiring for a four-year-old, Sumac thinks. It’s definitely more work for CardaMom, who has to lean over Brian and do the steering and most of the pushing while pretending she’s barely touching it.
“I tired!”
“Brian, want to play Battering Ram?” says Aspen.
“Yeah!”
This involves zooming Oak at poles and garbage cans, but going around them at the last minute. Because Brian’s been Oak’s big sister ever since he was born, even before the two of them came to Camelottery, she sees protecting him as her job, so she’d never really ram him into anything — but sometimes she steers him away from an obstacle so sharply, his top half lolls out the other side of the Oakmobile.
Today the game lasts about a minute and a half until they nearly collide with a woman on a mobility scooter and PapaDum says “Game over” in his deep voice that there’s no arguing with.
Here’s the Uh-Oh, a giant crystal, all shards of glass exploding out of the street. It’s really the Royal Ontario Museum, but when Brian first saw it (at two) that’s what she said — “Uh-oh!” — as if somebody’d smashed a vase, so the name stuck.
Sumac stashes her book in her backpack alongside From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (about kids who run away to live in a museum) and Smile (about dentistry, and a lot more exciting than it sounds). She always carries three, because what if you finish one and the next one sucks?
It’s spookily dark inside the exhibition, with spotlights. Oak thinks it’s a game and starts chortling.
“Imagine it’s five thousand years ago in a desert,” Sumac whispers to Brian.
“Napoleons!” Brian says it so loudly, she startles an old lady examining a carved stone. That’s what Brian calls people in the past: Napoleons, because he was a famous one. She has the impression that it was Jesus and his friends the cavemen, then Napoleons, then us.