“Besides, what else are we supposed to do? It’s an emergency.”
“Wah wah wah wah,” Brian wails like an ambulance.
Oak, chewing his sleeve, says something that sounds like wah wah, so they all clap.
“What I want to know,” says Aspen, balancing her rat on her tangled hair like a toupee, “is what are we going to call him?”
“Excellent question,” says MaxiMum.
“Egg salad,” says Brian, putting them right. She’s convinced that’s how you say excellent, because eggs are her favorite; she once ate five boiled ones without throwing up.
“Granddad? Grandpa?” suggests CardaMom.
Neither of those sound remotely right.
“Iain?” says PapaDum.
“No way,” moans Aspen, balancing her hoop vertically on her head and edging from side to side.
Brian makes a gigantic circle with her tiny butt, spinning the hoop twice before it drops with a clatter.
“Gramps?” says CardaMom.
Sumac shakes her head.
“Grumps, more like!” Pleased with this new word, Aspen does a double fist pump.
PapaDum starts a tug-of-war with Oak over the Hula-Hoop, which makes Oak laugh so much he loses his grip and topples sideways, planting his face on the mat.
*
Up in the Artic — their art space in the attic — Sumac’s working on something brilliant for Grumps. (She can’t help calling him that now — just in her head, obviously, not to his face.) If dementia makes people want to talk about the past all the time, but he’s too shy to start, this should help. Then Sumac will be the first of the Lotterys that he’ll warm up to during his visit, like the girl in the Narnia book — which one? — who charms the old Marsh-wiggle out of being gloomy.
So Sumac’s gone through all the little faded photos in the folder labeled Faro, Yukon, 1965–1983, picked out the ones that show PopCorn and his parents, and laid them out on the pool table. Now she’s scanning them to make a slideshow. His dead mom has a nice dimpled face, with tight curls all over her head. There’s one of her in a bikini on a rock — maybe sunbathing, because there’s no water nearby. And a funny one in yellow trousers and a headscarf, holding an ugly, bawling baby on her lap. Most babies are cuter than the adults they grow up to be, but with PopCorn it was clearly the opposite. Sumac uses the Ken Burns effect to zoom in slowly. Then she decides that Grumps would probably rather see his wife’s pretty face than Baby PopCorn’s purple one, so she changes the effect so it moves in on the mom instead. There aren’t very many pictures, so Sumac makes each one last six seconds. In the old days it seems like you took a couple of pictures of your kid, then put the camera away for months until he’d grown a bit.
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.