The parents don’t comment.
After a minute, PapaDum picks File Paperwork, but he says that’s so tedious and swaps it for PopCorn’s Hang Laundry on the Clotheslines. MaxiMum says she’ll keep Weed Veggie Beds. (More of a pleasure than a job, for her.)
Brian gets to choose a green card (which means an easy one), and Sumac reads it for her: “Fill Birdbaths.”
Brian nods importantly. “What for Oak?”
“Ah …” Oak’s not really old enough to be a lot of use yet, but Brian insists on including her little brother in everything, so Sumac offers him the hat. Oak seizes a fistful of cards. She extracts a green one from his sticky grip. It actually says Clear the Floor of Your Bedroom, but she thinks for a second, then says, “Dance,” because that’s one of his talents.
“Want to dance, Oaky?” asks Brian. “Dance?”
He jolts up and down in his high chair and lets out a high-pitched shriek.
Lastly, Sumac draws a card of her own. “Clean Toilets,” she reads aloud in a tone of woe. “All four, seriously?”
CardaMom’s a soft touch. “You start on the third floor, me in the basement,” she offers, “and I’ll race you to the second floor.”
MaxiMum’s rinsing plates with one hand and stacking them in the nearer dishwasher with the other. “And listen, kids, we all have to be more responsible about picking up things off the ground.”
“Especially on the stairs,” says PapaDum. “I just read that households with young children have the highest rate of falls, but the family members most likely to be hurt are those over sixty-five, because their bones are more brittle.”
Sumac thinks of peanut brittle going snap. If Grumps had to go to the hospital, would she get her room back? She wonders how long people live after eighty-two, then feels terrible and tries to forget she even thought it.
*
Passing the door of her old room, Sumac hears MaxiMum inside. “This was Sumac’s room, but we can repaint it however you’d prefer, Iain, it’s no trouble.”
They’re going to paint over the mural that PopCorn did for her when she was five?
“Sumac. Is she the gorgeous one?” she hears Grumps asking.
Sumac grits her teeth. He’s thinking of Catalpa. He could at least say something like, How kind of her to lend me her lovely bedroom.
“I find all our children gorgeous,” says MaxiMum. “Sumac’s very precise, thoughtful, responsible….”
She’d usually be glad to hear this, but right now they sound like dog qualities, and she’d swap all of them for one gorgeous.
“She’s the wee oriental, then? Or is she an Indian like Cardigan, whatshername, the other lady?”
He means CardaMom. So Grumps is one of those white people who describe everybody-whose-skin-isn’t-exactly-like-theirs as if they’re another species.
Instead of answering, MaxiMum says, pleasantly, “You’ve got a multicolored family now, Iain.”
“Like a bag of Smarties,” he says. And not as if he’s a big fan of Smarties. “Who are you to my son again?”
Can he have forgotten, Sumac wonders? Is this a lost marble? Or is he just being rude?
“Friend for twenty years, coparent of seven kids,” says MaxiMum.
Talking to this man is a sort of obstacle course for not losing your temper, Sumac decides. Well, he’s met his match in MaxiMum.
Sumac peeks into her poor abandoned room. Two cases stand beside the chair like guards. Maybe one of the brain marbles Grumps is missing is how to unpack a bag? She notices her five-by-five Rubik’s Cube in the corner, behind him, and she wants to retrieve it but doesn’t dare.
*
“See, kunuk is ancient Sumerian for seal,” Sumac tells Isabella, “and for more than one of something they just stuck .ene on the end, so these are kunuk.ene.” They’re in the Mess making clay seals to bake in the stove. Isabella and Sumac are doing cylinder seals like the Mesopotamians wore on strings around their wrists so if they wanted to seal something quickly they could just roll the picture on.
“Remind me why you’re trying to learn this language if everyone who ever spoke it is dead?” asks her friend, folding up the sleeves of her dress twice before she picks up the steak knife. Today Isabella’s nails are emerald green.
“Why not?” says Sumac with a shrug. “It’s all brainercise. Next time someone assumes I was adopted from China and asks me am I taking Mandarin classes, I can gobsmack them by saying, No, actually, Sumerian.”
“Ha! What are you carving — fairies?”
“Duh, it’s a banquet scene,” says Sumac. “There’s PapaDum with his big beard, see? And the rest of us, all the way down to Oak crawling. I was going to arrange us by height, with MaxiMum first, but then I decided that in ancient times people would have been more impressed by age, because you had to be pretty clever or lucky to live long.”