Grumps and Brian keep those marbles she stole from Toytally Awesome in a tin hidden in the Wild so Oak won’t swallow them, and they get them out every afternoon when Oak’s kaput, to talk very boringly about bosses and puries. Brian seems to be winning all Grumps’s puries off him, or maybe he’s letting her? Then every evening after dinner, MaxiMum smokes her one cigarette with Grumps, and Wood and Diamond invite him to come check out what’s new in the Ravine.
In his poker-faced way, Grumps teases Catalpa about the length of Quinn’s hair and whether the boy is actually capable of speaking or was born without a tongue. When Catalpa finally agrees to let her family hear Game of Tones’s cover version of “Happy” (which Sic’s already tracked down online and pronounced “not as excruciating as you’d expect”), Grumps nods along seriously as if he’s listening to Bach.
Sumac hears him remarking to Aspen that she looks the spit of her grandmother, the first Elspeth. She’s about to tell him that Aspen’s bios are CardaMom and PapaDum, actually, so Aspen didn’t get any of her genes from him or his dead wife … and then she decides this is probably another button-your-lip moment.
As for Sumac, she mostly talks books with him — especially old ones. He gets quite excited about her reading The Princess and the Goblin because of George MacDonald being Scottish, and all the stuff about mining; it turns out Grumps was a mining engineer for forty years.
All this time he’s had the impression that Sumac’s about twelve, “but undersized, you know, from the orphanage.”
“I wasn’t ever in an orphanage, remember?”
“Oh, aye,” says Grumps, as if he’s doubting Sumac’s memory but doesn’t want to call her on it.
Anyway, she supposes it’s a compliment that he thought she was mature enough to be twelve instead of nine.
* * *
On Sunday evening Sumac passes Sic doing up his Day-Glo laces in the Hall of Mirrors and adding “Vrum-vrum with Lin-Lin” to the Where Board.
“Who’s Lin-Lin?” she asks.
“It means beauty of a tinkling bell,” he says with a hollow laugh.
“Mrs. Zhao?”
“Dui,” says Sic with a nod, so that must mean yes. “Spotted it on her phone bill.” He’s set himself a challenge of squeezing the max out of his driving sessions by learning a hundred words in Mandarin. “Beauty of a pounding gong, more like. Check your mirror!” He imitates Mrs. Zhao’s stern accent. “Eyes where you wanna go!”
“Isn’t she getting any less bossy, then?”
Sic pats her shoulder. “Adults don’t change, kiddo, you just get used to them, figure out some workarounds.”
“And is she used to you yet?” Sumac wonders, noticing his socks: one gray Argyle, one Winnie the Pooh.
Her brother grins. “Now she’s got her head around my having two moms and two dads, she insists I should obey all of them all the time — like, filial piety times four.”
“What’s filly —”
“Being nice to your parents. Work hard, keep family strong! And she’s impressed that we’ve got Grumps living with us — that’s filial piety big-time.”
“Is your driving getting any better?” Sumac remembers to ask, when her brother’s halfway out the door.
“Buzhidao,” says Sic, his hand doing a so-so gesture. “Hard to tell, when she calls me an idiot all the time.”
Out in the Wild, the others are waiting for Sumac to lead the Monarch Tag.
A butterfly nerd couple — not two nerdy butterflies, but a human husband and wife who were nerds about butterflies — started the project here in Toronto back in the 1940s. Sunset’s the best, when the monarchs are roosting. You creep up from behind and sweep the net over the butterfly, then flip the end of the net over the handle so it can’t escape. Hold the edge of the wings through the mesh, reach in with the other hand and grasp it gently by its back. Only the boy ones have a black spot on the hind wing.
“Gotcha,” howls Aspen.
Sumac goes over to check. “No, that’s a viceroy — see the black line across the hind wings?”
Aspen makes her evilest orc face at Sumac and turns her net inside out to release the viceroy.
Brian spends most of the time chasing them, waving her net and shouting, “Butterfly, stop!” They fly about twenty kilometers an hour, so she has no chance, especially in her fire truck, but nobody wants to discourage her. Brian’s legs are bloody from bramble scratches, but she doesn’t even seem to notice.
Kid fingers are actually better at sticking on the tiny tags than adult ones. You note down the tag code, date, location, name, and address on the data sheet, peel the backing off the tag, press it over the mitten-shaped cell on the wing … then release the monarch on the nose of whichever kid caught it. That last bit isn’t science, just tradition. It feels tickly but amazing: like you’re a launchpad for a tiny rocket.
“It’s so that somebody might find this butterfly after she’s been to Mexico and back and died,” Sumac explains to Brian, “and they’ll email to say where she ended up.”
“I don’t want her died!”
“Just of being old,” says Sumac, regretting that she mentioned that detail. “She’ll be really tired by then.”
“Us too?”
“No,” Sumac tells her, “next spring we’ll still be young.”
Aspen says, “Grumps!”
“You mean that he’s old?”
“No, I mean, we could tag him in case we lose him again. Maybe an electronic one like the thing on CardaMom’s suitcase that beeps if she walks too far away from it.”
Sumac frowns. “I don’t think Grumps would put up with that. It might feel like he’s a dog, or under house arrest.”
“It wouldn’t give him an electric shock or anything,” says Aspen.
“No, but imagine if he’s going for a walk and suddenly starts beeping…. Awkward!”
They can’t find any more monarchs so they head back toward the house. Topaz is splayed in a patch of sun like a furry orange starfish, so Aspen kneels to stroke her belly. In the vegetable patch, PapaDum and Grumps are transplanting shallot seedlings. Watching the two men bent over, working without a word, it occurs to Sumac that PapaDum might suit Grumps as a son better than PopCorn.
Brian wants a snail race, so she and Sumac and Aspen each find one in the bushes and put them down on a shady slab. In chalk they draw one start line and one finish line.
Sumac remembers a joke from the book, exactly the right one for this moment. She takes a breath and remembers not to announce that she’s telling a joke. “What does a snail say when it’s riding on a turtle’s back?”
Aspen looks at her warily.
To deliver the punch line, Sumac makes her best attempt at the facial expression of a joyriding snail. “Wheeeeeeeee!”
Aspen, Brian, PapaDum, and even Grumps burst out laughing.
“You did it,” cries Aspen.
Sumac sticks out her tongue and smiles.
“Wheeeee!” repeats Grumps, chuckling.
“Your grandfather’s good with a trowel,” says PapaDum, straightening up and arching his back till it clicks.
“Dig, dig, dig,” Grumps sings under his breath,
And your muscles will grow big.
Don’t mind the worms,
Just ignore their squirms …
The kids all laugh at that.
“Had a pig club,” he adds.
“What did it do?” asks Aspen.
“The pig?”
“No, your club.”
Grumps shrugs. “Went round collecting scraps, fed our pig everything we could find. Rabbits too.”
“You fed it rabbits?” asks Sumac in horror.
“No, you numpty! We kept a few rabbits too, on the side, like.”
“You teached them tricks?” Brian wants to know.
He stares at her. “Kids today, no sense of reality. The rabbits were for the pot!” He mimes munching. “But Sausage Day, when the pig got butchered” — he slits his throat
with a finger — “that was champion.”
Brian’s face contorts.
“This was during the war, yeah?” asks PapaDum. “You must have been hungry.”
“Not on Sausage Day,” says Grumps, stabbing his trowel into the dirt.
* * *
Brian insists on wearing her fire truck to The Wizard of Oz because it’s like a drive-in.
“More like a walk-in,” says Sic.
The show’s in the park around the corner, with a big white sheet hung over a wall for a screen, starting about 8:20 so the last rays of the sun don’t get in the audience’s eyes.
PopCorn immediately joins the drumming circle that’s formed under the big walnut tree. CardaMom spreads out the black-and-red raven blanket, and PapaDum serves up his homemade mint tea from one big flask and chocolate milk from another. People are buying beers from coolers and cooking hot dogs and skewers over a fire pit. It all smells so good, Sumac feels hungry even though she had curried-salmon-on-a-plank an hour ago. A music video comes on, and kids and some adults are already jumping around.
A guy pushes a cart with Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty painted on the side, handing out slices of watermelon. “Eleven over here,” calls Catalpa.
CardaMom makes a slapping gesture at her. “We can share,” she tells him.
He’s got huge black plugs in his earlobes and a shaved head with two buns on top. “No probs, no sweat, big whoop, eleven it is.”
“Actually, sorry, twelve,” says Sumac. “We used to be eleven, but now our grandfather lives with us too.” Little by little, she supposes, Grumps is going to turn into a Lottery too.
“The full dozen, cool,” says the watermelon guy, nodding.
Like eggs, thinks Sumac, or months, or roses.
Now the MGM lion is roaring on the screen and the violins are soaring from the speakers hidden in the bushes. Brian says it’s too louderer, so Grumps fits his hands over her ears.
Having him at Camelottery is not exactly cool, Sumac thinks. More like a complicated cat’s cradle that keeps getting snagged till you figure it out. But still, in the end, big whoop.
* * *
The next morning Brian’s fire truck’s lost — because she fell asleep before Dorothy even met the Munchkins, and PapaDum carried her home hours later, and each Lottery thought somebody else was in charge of the truck. She’s crying her eyes out and asking to go back to the park to check again “in case the robber be sorry and druv it back.”
Sic’s trying to comfort her with a long yarn about a family of raccoons dragging it behind a bush to raise their seven babies in.
“No use bawling,” says Grumps with a snort.
Brian goes puce.
Sumac remembers exactly why she’s disliked this old man from day one.
“Plenty more cardboard where that came from,” he tells Brian. “What would you say to a Spitfire?”
“What a spitfire?”
Sumac stiffens: Doesn’t it mean a girl with a bad temper?
“Only the pride of the Royal Air Force, best single-seater fighter plane ever made,” says Grumps.
Brian’s eyes light up.
Today’s the August full moon, so most of the Lotterys are getting ready for Rakhi. Sumac and Catalpa decorate the special threads for tying on their brothers while PapaDum struggles with the chocolate truffles. He’s trying to roll some in cocoa, some in nuts, some in cinnamon, some in coconut, but they keep sticking to his hands because of the heat, and Topaz is twining round his legs mewing for a snack.
“Can I make some?” Aspen wanders in from outside, shiny with sunblock and sweat.
“Which,” asks PapaDum, “truffles or Rakhi threads?”
“Both.”
“Not at the same time!” they all chime together.
PapaDum straightens up with a grunt. “These need to go back in the refrigerator for a while.”
“Then I’ll do threads,” says Aspen.
“Why not?” Sumac makes herself say it.
But Aspen’s mooched off already with a “back in a minute,” so that’s good; she’ll forget all about it.
“Three brothers, multiplied by four sisters,” murmurs Catalpa, “that’s twelve.”
“Actually,” says PapaDum, “a woman can tie one around the wrist of any man she considers a sort of brother for life, so your moms could have another four, to tie on me and PopCorn.”
“Fine,” says Catalpa, “keep us slaving away all day.”
Braiding threads, Sumac gazes out the window. Grumps is lifting Brian into the Spitfire they’ve spent all morning making out of boxes; her little legs thrash with
excitement. (Sic is sprawled nearby to keep an eye on them, with that fat book called Cryptonomicon he’s read so often it’s broken in half.) The finishing touch is a propeller — made of wire hangers and packing tape and attached to the nose. Grumps bends and spins it. “What about Grumps?” she asks. “He doesn’t have a sister.”
“He has two of them, actually, but they live in Glasgow and New Zealand,” says PapaDum.
“Let’s call him a sort-of-brother too, then,” Sumac suggests.
“Six more coming up,” says Catalpa, heaving a sigh. But you can tell she’s enjoying herself.
So is Sumac. How compatible she and her big sister would be, she thinks — if only they liked each other.
“Ammi,” PapaDum’s saying to his mother via Skype, “why don’t you supervise the girls, so I can get the onion bhaji in the stove and … No, I don’t fry my bhaji, baking’s much healthier.”
Sumac can hear Dadi Ji’s outraged voice over the top of his.
On the tablet, their grandmother watches Catalpa and Sumac decorate their folded and knotted bundles of silk threads. “Have you put gold threads in with the red and yellow?” she asks, putting her face so near the webcam that she looms. “That’s even more auspicious.”
Sumac meets Catalpa’s eyes. They ran out of gold after the first five.
“A few,” Catalpa tells their grandmother. “And lots of beads and sequins.”
“When you’ve braided and tied them, don’t forget to fluff the ends with a toothbrush. Now which of you is preparing the special thali plate?”
Catalpa’s ready for this one. “We wondered if you’d possibly have time to be in charge of that, Dadi Ji?”
“If you prefer, my dear,” says their grandmother, readjusting her pink veil above her little gold glasses.
On the other side of the Mess, PapaDum gives a thumbs-up. Because between the betel leaves, the diya lamp, the roli powder arranged in a swastika (the lucky kind, not the evil Nazi kind), the rice, the incense sticks, and the gods know what else, the Lotterys are likely to get it wrong and deeply offend some deity (e.g., their grandmother).
“Now, you’ll give your brothers sweets and put tilak powder on their foreheads, and have they prepared the envelopes of cash?”
“The boys are going to give the girls sweets too,” Sumac tells her.
“That’s not very traditional,” she scolds.
“Well, let’s face it, Ammi,” PapaDum calls, “nor are we.”
A while later, Grumps and Brian stagger into the Mess very red-faced, in need of lemonade.
“Grumps, would it be all right if we tie bracelets on you at the party?” asks Catalpa.
“What party?”
“Rakhi,” Sumac reminds him for the third time today, “the only festival in the world that celebrates brothers and sisters.”
“Still sounds a bit makey-uppy to me,” he mutters, fiddling with his new chunky black watch.
By makey-uppy he means Hindu. But Sumac lets it go. “So can we?”
“Couldn’t care less, hen.”
“It says Tuesday the twentieth of August,” says Aspen, reading his watch over his shoulder. “Unfair! I want a watch that tells me all that.”
“You have two watches,” says Sumac, “but you never remember to put them on.”
“You don’t even go to school,
missy,” Grumps says to Aspen, “so what do you care what day it is?”
“You know you don’t have to wear that thing?” Catalpa says in his ear.
“It’s waterproof,” says Grumps. “Kept it on in the shower this morning.”
“No, but — it’s surveillance,” says Catalpa. “Big Brother, watching you by GPS.”
“Is there a wee camera?” he asks, peering into the screen.
“I don’t mean actually watching you, just —”
“If you were gone all day, Iain,” PapaDum explains, “we could look up a website to see where you were, that’s all.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that they’re infringing your rights?” Catalpa demands.
“Young lady,” says Grumps, “you’ll find the world is full of things a sight more bothersome than a free watch.”
“My friend Liam has a GPS chip in his backpack,” says Aspen, “and he totally freaked his folks out by going on a sleepover and accidentally leaving the backpack on the bus so it went around and around the city….”
“What say that?” says Brian, pointing at the word SOS on Grumps’s watch.
“That’s my special button for emergencies,” says Grumps, pressing it hard.
“Wah wah wah wah,” Brian squeals.
“Hi again, Dad,” says PopCorn’s voice from the watch — very small and tinny — a second later.
“That you, Reginald?” Grumps lifts his wrist to his mouth.
“Who else do you think would call you Dad?”
Grumps nods. “Where are you at the minute?”
“In the basement sorting socks. Do you need something else?”
“Wouldn’t say no to a cup of tea.”
A squeaking sound that turns out to be PopCorn laughing.
When Isabella comes over, Sumac and she escape all the way up to the top of the house. “Ready?” asks Sumac. “Think ice palace.” She throws open the door on which she’s hung up her carved Sumac’s Room sign at last.
“Oo!”
“PopCorn’s been slaving over this for the past two days, that’s why it’s still fumey.”