The Lotterys Plus One

  She tries out some cool transitions between the slides — mosaics, then droplets — but in the end she guesses an old person might prefer the pictures to come one after another like a book. For the background music, she looks up tophitsofeverydecade.com. Of the 1960s songs, she’s only heard of “Wonderful World,” the one with those funny lyrics about not knowing much history or biology, so she uses that, because it suits a baby.

  Dangalangalong —

  That’s the faint ringing of the cowbell for dinner, but she’s done anyway. Sumac bets the old man will be touched that she’s gone to all this trouble.

  Out on the Derriere (which is French for butt, because the back porch is the butt of Camelottery), there isn’t enough breeze even to tinkle the chimes. “Is that rat about?” Grumps asks suspiciously.

  “Aspen’s not allowed to bring him to meals,” Sumac assures him, “ever since he stole the ham out of MaxiMum’s sandwich.”

  “What about a Highland grace tonight, in your dad’s honor?” CardaMom says to PopCorn.

  “Just the thing!” He leaps up, slaps a creepy-crawly out of the neck of his T-shirt, and launches into Scots verse:

  Some have meat and cannae eat,

  And some would eat that want it;

  But we have meat, and we can eat,

  So let the Lord be thankit!

  “Booya!” Opal squawks from where he sits on the rail.

  The grandfather keeps his eyes on his empty plate. Praying? Sumac wonders. Tired? Or has his brain just switched off, like a computer going into sleep mode?

  PapaDum comes in from the Mess. “Sorry, the quinoa still needs another ten minutes. Brian rang the bell a bit early.”

  Clang-clong: Oak’s invisible in a cupboard, pulling saucepans out.

  “Can I do my slideshow now, then?” asks Sumac, because she’ll enjoy her dinner more after it.

  “Sure,” says MaxiMum. “What’s it about?”

  “It’s a surprise. For, for you,” says Sumac, nodding awkwardly at the grandfather, because she still doesn’t know what to call him.

  “Great!” CardaMom rushes off to find the projector.

  “Thoughtful kiddo,” PopCorn murmurs to Sumac.

  She makes sure the projector is aimed right at the big white sheet hung up on the brick wall of the house — and gets MaxiMum to swap chairs because she’s so tall she might block Grumps’s view.

  When everyone’s settled, Sumac presses play. The song starts over an image of the Yukon mountains and the little house and old-fashioned car, with a younger Iain standing beside it in a hard hat like PapaDum used to wear on construction sites.

  She sneaks a look at the old man, but she can’t tell anything from his face as he sips his water.

  Now comes PopCorn’s mother in her polka-dot bikini, and the singer’s saying he doesn’t know much geography or trigonometry or algebra. There’s one of her digging in the garden, with Baby PopCorn lying beside her putting his toes in his mouth —

  A crash. Grumps has shoved back his chair so fast, he’s almost toppled off the Derriere into the lilac bushes.

  “Dad,” says PopCorn, jumping up, “are you OK?”

  But the old man’s pushing past the kids — stepping right over Brian — and stalking into the Mess. The door thumps shut behind him.

  The song’s going on about one and one being two, and here’s little PopCorn (still pretty ugly) riding a trike, with his mother running along behind him….

  Sumac turns off the slideshow with a single tap, so the big sheet on the wall is just a sheet again.

  “What’s up with him?” asks Aspen. “Was that from being dementored?”

  PopCorn’s got his hand pressed to his mouth.

  Sumac’s voice comes out tiny. “It was meant to be like a scrapbook.”

  “My bad,” says CardaMom with a sigh, reaching across the table for Sumac’s hand. “I said that Iain would maybe want to talk about long ago more than nowadays, but I didn’t mean we should force it.”

  I didn’t force him to do anything, Sumac thinks furiously.

  “Sometimes people aren’t in the mood for remembering,” says PapaDum.

  PopCorn picks up the almost-empty water jug and walks into the Mess.

  “This is really only day one of his stay,” says CardaMom. “I bet he’ll warm up to us in no time.”

  “A stay’s just another word for a visit, isn’t it?” Sumac asks, her voice suddenly wobbly.

  “That’s … still under discussion,” says MaxiMum, looking at PapaDum.

  “We’ve agreed to see how it goes,” he says in a not-particularly-happy voice.

  Hang on. Sumac went to Yukon to help cheer the grandfather up and find him a new place to live there. Eleven people live in Camelottery already, just counting humans. Grumps has come for a stay with them, but it doesn’t mean he can stay.

  She slaps the laptop shut.

  6:13 A.M. on Sumac’s clock. She can hear male black-capped chickadees singing their two-note tune — da, da — the only birdsong she always recognizes because it’s the G and F above middle C. The screen door squeals and bangs as CardaMom goes out onto the grass behind Camelottery, like she does every morning, to call out her Thanksgiving Address to the natural world. Mrs. Zhao next door sometimes gets cranky about it and puts up the radio really loud.

  Then Sumac remembers about upsetting the new grandfather with her slideshow last night, when she was really trying to be nice to him. She curls up in a ball. Did he stay mad for long, she wonders? Dementia makes you forget things, which could be quite handy if the things are the kind that make you feel bad.

  Above her, she can hear the bump that means Brian jumping out of bed. Why do the smallest feet always sound the loudest?

  Sumac goes upstairs and through the dads’ open door. “Budge up, make room,” PopCorn cries.

  “Sh.” PapaDum beckons her into the bed, where Brian and Oak are already curled up like puppies between the dads’ big bodies.

  “Oak! Oaky-doke,” says Brian. “Roll over!”

  PapaDum shushes her.

  “Oh, my dad can’t expect a family this big to be quiet as the grave,” says PopCorn.

  “He stinky,” says Brian.

  “Not nice,” PapaDum tells her.

  “That’s tobacco. I used to love the smell,” says PopCorn nostalgically. He inhales Brian’s shaved head. “Now you, you smell as sweet as jam.”

  Sumac tries a sniff of Brian. “Strawberry. No, raspberry.”

  “Eating jam in the night?” PopCorn asks Brian. “Out at some wild party, were you? Kicking up your heels with the Twelve Dancing Princesses?”

  “I be the prince,” she tells him. Brian has never actually claimed to be a boy, but she won’t let anyone call her a girl either. “Where you?”

  “Last night? Camping on the moon, of course.”

  “Nah!”

  “Wood sleeps outside in the summer, doesn’t he?” asks PopCorn. “Well, I sleep on the moon.”

  “Liar pants on fire,” says Brian.

  “Tickle fight!” Aspen yells from the bedroom door: She dive-bombs painfully across all five of them.

  “No breaking our baby,” roars Brian.

  Aspen digs Oak out of the pile and holds him in the air, helicopter-style.

  He giggles, his dribble a spiderweb dangling. She tilts him over PapaDum on purpose.

  “Get him off!”

  “I know a joke about a bed,” Sumac mentions.

  Aspen groans. “You kill any joke stone dead.”

  Sumac decides to ignore that. “Here goes. What did the blanket —”

  “Everyone in the entire world knows that one,” says Aspen.

  Sumac presses her lips together and decides to try it another time, when her sister’s not around. “Can we go to the beach today?” she asks instead.

  “Why not?” says PopCorn.

  “Except, if your dad —” begins PapaDum.

  Argh. He’d slipped out of Sumac’s mind again
for a split second.

  PopCorn pulls a face. “Maybe not today, then,” he tells her.

  Sumac wishes the old man was still in Yukon being dormant. Now he’s more like a volcano that’s starting to rumble.

  “But very soon,” says PopCorn. “We can’t put our lives on hold.”

  “Can he still swim, with his dimension?” Aspen wonders.

  “Dementia,” Sumac corrects her.

  PopCorn giggles: “I like that: The Grandfather from Another Dimension! Yeah, I bet he remembers how to swim.”

  Something’s been bothering Sumac. “He doesn’t really seem like he has a brain emergency.”

  “Well, I suppose he’s only lost some of his marbles so far, which means the gaps don’t show up in every conversation,” says PopCorn, tapping his head. “Like Swiss cheese — perfectly solid in between the holes.”

  Aspen plonks Oak onto Brian. “My turn for tickles, everybody else scoot.”

  “You scoot,” growls Brian.

  “Nearests and dearests,” says PopCorn, squeezing all four kids in his arms, “love is not a pie.”

  “You mean it’s not gooey?” asks Aspen.

  “What other qualities does a pie have?” asks PapaDum.

  “Crumbly? Sticky? Foul, if it’s pumpkin?”

  “We don’t have to fight for a slice?” suggests Sumac.

  PopCorn nods. “There really is enough for everyone, because it’s a magic pie that gets bigger when —” Then he lets out a terrible groan because Brian’s knelt on his stomach.

  * * *

  No beach today, because the parents are busy arranging stuff for the grandfather. CardaMom puts the sprinkler on in the afternoon, but it’s not the same as lake waves.

  Right now Sumac is being Milkweed Monitor at the very back of the Wild, trying to blow bugs away from her face. Bent over a randomly chosen square meter with a magnifying glass, she fills in the weekly data sheet that she’ll mail to the monarch butterfly program.

  Sumac likes doing citizen science — like, in this case, helping figure out what the butterflies need if they’re going to survive — but she’s got sunscreen melting into her eyes, and they’re stinging so much she can hardly tell a blob of monarch latex from an egg. She’d actually rather be reading Ballet Shoes on her belly in the Tree Fort, where she could smell the cut grass but stay out of the sun.

  When she finally staggers back up the yard, wondering if she has sunstroke maybe, she finds CardaMom — yellow pollen all down her braid — weeding the boat-shaped raised beds of lettuces. Brian, in nothing but tiny swim shorts and a plastic medieval breastplate, is helping her. Opal’s by his portable perch in the sunshine, picking ants out of the grass, and Topaz is writhing pleasurably on her back on the cover of the Hot Tub. (The cats don’t seem to think of Opal as a real bird they should try to eat, which is a bit insulting, Sumac thinks.)

  Oak crawls over to Sumac, ghah-ghahing, suspiciously brown around the mouth. “Have you been eating dirt again, Oaky-doke?”

  He grins radiantly.

  “Not again!” CardaMom straightens, pressing the arch of her back, and scoops him up. “Full speed ahead to the OK Corral….”

  That’s Oak’s plastic play yard, parked in the shade of the big maple. She deposits him in there with a stack of old flowerpots and a beach ball.

  “Come and get hydrated, kids.” PapaDum walks out of the house with a jug of lemonade, a platter of yellow watermelon under a mesh cover, and muffins that are still steaming. They’re banana, tinted pink with beet juice, and PapaDum’s probably snuck lots of ground-up seeds into them, but you can’t tell.

  Aspen inserts one in each cheek and mumbles, “Look, I’m a chipmunk.”

  Sumac spots MaxiMum down the back of the Wild in rubber boots, gloves, and a white mask, like something out of an end-of-the-world movie. “What are you doing?” she calls.

  “Collecting raccoon droppings so we don’t pick up parasitic worms that’ll make us go blind or fall into a coma.”

  “Ew,” says Sumac. Droppings: there’s another euphemism. Excrement, feces, scat, dung, or guano if you’re a bird.

  CardaMom brings over a slice of watermelon and lifts MaxiMum’s mask to feed it to her.

  Just then Aspen shrieks from the house: “My back!”

  Has she shot herself with a Nerf gun at really close range again? (In the back, is that possible?) Or was she playing the totally forbidden Tightrope Walk on the Banisters and she’s fallen down four flights of stairs?

  No. “They’re back,” that’s what she’s shrieking. And Diamond’s barking crazily, which means it’s the dog’s beloved Wood and the other two big sibs, home from Camp Jagged Falls at last.

  Sic’s Afro is huger than ever, with pine needles in it, and his old T-shirt is one of the first he ever printed: Free Shrugs, a pun on Free Hugs. Aspen pushes past Sumac to jump on his back like a vampire bat and kiss his ear.

  “Smackeroo,” Sic cries next, opening his arms at Sumac.

  He’s the only one who calls her that. She gives him the longest hug and whispers in his ear: “I missed you nearly as much as I didn’t miss Catalpa.”

  That makes him laugh.

  Wood follows, barefoot, scratched, and burr-studded as usual, Diamond panting at his heel. You’d hardly notice she only has three legs unless you knew to look.

  “You’re fuzzy,” Sumac tells Sic.

  Her big brother grins, rubbing his stubbly cheeks. “Hard to shave in the backcountry….”

  Wood, jealous, mimes machine-gunning him.

  “One of these years you too will have facial hair, little man,” Sic tells him, slapping his back, then ducking away from Wood’s fist. Even though Wood’s only twelve, his punches are the hardest.

  “We should have tied you up and left you in the bush for the coyotes to eat,” says Wood, as deep-voiced as he can.

  “Is that any way to talk to your Team Leader?”

  “You only got picked for that because of age discrimination.” Wood is glowering. “It should be based on knowledge — like, wood lore.”

  “Wood lore?” Catalpa yelps with laughter as she heads out of the Mess. “You total hobbit.” She runs straight to Oak, hoisting him out of his corral to kiss him all over. She’s covered in angry-looking mosquito bites, Sumac notices.

  “Why you all spotty?” Brian asks Catalpa.

  “Because bugs find her delicious, and who can blame them?” says CardaMom, arms wrapped around her teenagers in a double hug that’s halfway to a wrestle.

  Sumac’s secretly relieved that it’ll be three years before she has to go on the wilderness trip and spend two weeks living off trail mix, jerky, and rehydrated chili. She tries to think of something friendly to say to her biggest sister, who hasn’t even said hi yet. “Hey, I like your friendship bracelets.” They go right up Catalpa’s golden arm; some of them have beads in them, and even leaves and tiny feathers in resin. “Do you actually remember who made each one?”

  “I could never forget,” says Catalpa. (Dramatically, the way she says everything these days.) She names them: “Madison, Addison, Ashley, Olivia, Mackenzie, Maya, Alexis, Jazmyn, other Madison …”

  “Me and Aspen have been making friendship bracelets too, out of old Rainbow Loom bands,” Sumac tells her.

  Catalpa shakes her head. “They’re not proper friendship bracelets unless they’re thread.”

  Sumac chews her lip and wishes her sister had stayed away a bit longer.

  “We gots another grandfather,” Brian announces, pointing.

  And Sumac’s stomach sinks, because she’d actually forgotten. They all spin around, and there’s PopCorn leading his unsmiling father out into the Wild.

  CardaMom makes all the introductions. Grumps’s drippy eyes shift from face to face, and it’s one of those moments when Sumac sees her family as if from outer space. What a lot of us. Is it scary to meet a whole gang of new grandchildren all at the same time, she wonders?

  Grumps doesn’t look scared, j
ust grim as ever.

  Sic is charming, of course, as if he’s been waiting to meet his fourth grandfather all his sixteen years of life.

  Wood just nods, all tough-guy as usual.

  Catalpa produces a minimal wave. “Can I —” She nods upward toward her Turret. “I promised the band we’d jam.”

  “Since when are you in a band?” scoffs Wood.

  Oh, great, thinks Sumac. That’s all Catalpa needs to turn her into a complete monster.

  “It’s a virtual one called Game of Tones,” says Catalpa, “and Mackenzie’s pretty sure the others will vote me in once I upload a sample track.”

  The stubbled ridges on the old man’s forehead soar. “What’s a virtual band when it’s at home?”

  “Ah, each of us, we’re going to record to a click track, and once the piece is collaboratively mastered we’ll release it virally, you know?”

  Sumac doesn’t think the grandfather understood any of that.

  “So you’re just teenagers messing around online,” Wood spells out.

  “That’s a drastic oversimplification,” says Catalpa, glaring at her brother.

  “Game of Drones, I like it,” says Sic.

  “Tones,” Catalpa corrects him.

  He keeps a straight face but winks at Sumac.

  Sic’s been trying to teach her to wink for years, but it makes half her face scrunch up, and then Aspen always asks her (fake concerned) if she’s having a stroke.

  * * *

  The Lotterys are walking to dinner. They pass a cyclist who’s arguing furiously with a taxi driver. Then they cut through some kind of pop-up street fair called Fruitarama. A century and a half ago, when the huge redbrick houses like Camelottery were built, the neighborhood used to be the city’s richest. Then an expressway cut it off from the lake, and it turned into the poorest. Now it’s what PopCorn calls a mixed bag, which makes things interesting.

  After CardaMom’s class — she “volun-teaches” kids who can’t afford voice and violin lessons — she’s coming to meet the family at Pete’s Rear, which is how Brian once misheard their local pizzeria. It looks really narrow and scuzzy at the front, but at the back there’s a vast patio strung with fairy lights and a table big enough for the Lotterys.