She blinks. “If it’s brown?”
Grumps stares at her as if she’s said something filthy.
She feels herself blushing and looks at the bare boards, where her lovely soft rug used to lie. “Like the signs on the tanks say. If it’s brown, flush it down,” she chants in a very small voice, “but if it’s yellow, let it mellow.” An awful pause. “It saves about six liters every time.”
The old man throws out his hand toward the south. “Ye live on a lake too big to see across!”
“Yeah, but …” Sumac wishes one of the teenagers or parents were here to explain it better. “See, if all the water on the planet was in a glass —” She looks around. “Do you have a glass of water?”
“Why would I?”
“To drink. In the night.”
“Don’t like water,” says Grumps, “day or night.”
Sumac is thrown by that. “OK, well, imagic — imagine,” she corrects herself. “Ninety-seven percent of the water in the glass would be salty, right?”
“Why would you fill a glass with salty water?”
“It’s a metaphor,” she says. “And nearly all the rest, the last three percent of all the water in the world, is frozen or filthy. So there’s only zero point one eight percent that’s drinkable, and we have to share it with all the other living things.”
“Just as well I never touch the stuff, then, isn’t it?”
Was that a joke? Grumps is not smiling.
Sumac struggles to find a new subject. “Would you like … maybe a tour of all the bits of Camelottery you haven’t seen yet?”
“Of what?”
“This house.”
“Nae thank you.” That didn’t sound polite, even if it did include a thank you.
Upstairs in the Theater it sounds like Brian’s watching Frozen, which Sumac only pretends to not like anymore. She wonders whether she’s spent long enough in this bare, nasty-smelling room that she can leave without a parent asking why she isn’t being a guide dog.
“What age were you when you landed up here?” Grumps asks suddenly.
She’s startled by the question. “Ah, two hours.”
“Aren’t you one of those wee girlies from a Chinese orphanage?”
“No I’m not.” But Sumac supposes he’s trying to make conversation, in his unpleasant way, so she goes on, “The moms and dads brought me straight from the hospital in a cab.”
Sic always claims that he, at seven, had the casting vote on whether the Lotterys wanted a fifth baby. He says that because Number Four (Aspen) was barely walking, he only agreed to another little sister on the condition that this one would Revere and Obey Him at All Times. Sumac doesn’t exactly revere Sic, but she does adore him.
“My birth mom’s Filipina, by the way,” she adds, just so the old man won’t think she doesn’t know, “and my birth dad’s ancestors are from Germany.”
His forehead crinkles up.
“My bios aren’t a couple. And they didn’t want to be anybody’s mom or dad,” she spells out.
“Why not?”
“Dunno. Did you want to be a dad?” Sumac asks, thinking of PopCorn-the-ugly-baby in the faded photos.
The wet old eyes blink at her. “Not particularly,” Grumps says as if to himself, “but these things sort themselves out, I suppose.”
“Nenita’s in Ottawa but she travels all the time for work,” says Sumac, trying to think of something else to say. “Jensen lives about twenty hours’ drive away in Manitoba.” She doesn’t mention that they’re both accountants, because that sounds weird.
“Never heard the like,” murmurs Grumps. “Do they come see you at all, these whatchamacallem, bio people?”
“Oh yeah,” says Sumac. Though never at the same time. She thinks Nenita and Jensen’s what-will-we-do-about-the-baby conversation probably happened over email.
Grumps has put just one thing on the desk that used to be hers: a calendar of Wildflowers of Yukon. The July page shows a little purple blossom. He’s drawn diagonal slashes through the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth. Ah, it’s the days he’s been in Toronto, Sumac realizes.
Day one of his stay, CardaMom said, but a stay is what you have in a hotel, until you go home. If you’re really going to stay somewhere for the moment, for the present, it’s not called a stay. Prisoners do time. That’s what the linesthrough the dates are like: the scratches a prisoner makes on a cell wall.
The old man’s eyes have followed Sumac’s
to the calendar. “The whole crew of ye’ll be on your holliers for months, I suppose.”
“On our what?”
“School holidays.”
“Oh, we don’t go to school,” says Sumac.