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!”