“Then if you time-traveled back,” says Aspen, deepening the moat around her sand castle, “nobody would understand you?”
Sumac hadn’t thought of that. “Hey, something else that’s cool is that it’s got two genders, but they’re not male and female, they’re human and nonhuman. Also …” She tries to remember everything she’s been cramming. “Mesopotamians wore stone wigs. And they didn’t have to have their ears pierced, because they wore hoops right over their ears. Oh, and if a man needed money, he could sell his wife and children as slaves for three years.”
PopCorn hoots. “Those were the days when dads had it good. What real use are you to me if I can’t rent you out, Nexts of Kin?”
MaxiMum leans over to tap Catalpa on the shoulder, making her jump. Then she disentangles the earbuds from Catalpa’s long hair.
“Don’t!”
“You’re missing some fascinating history.”
“Oh, woe,” says Catalpa.
“Be present or begone, my love.”
“OK, OK.” She puts away her music but reopens her paperback and stretches like a panther, yawning.
“Do you think she could have caught sleeping sickness?” PopCorn asks.
“I’m shattered from getting up so hideously early,” Catalpa says without looking up.
She’s got a job walking a five-year-old to the girl’s Space Camp every morning, and home again in the afternoons.
“Ridiculously easy money, I call it,” says Wood, eyes still shut on the sand, “so zip your lip. I don’t earn a cent for being an Environmental Steward.”
“That’s because all you guys do is stand around spraying each other with hoses!”
MaxiMum speaks over them: “Family life of the eastern garter snake, Wood?”
He groans and heaves up on one elbow. “OK. Get this: not monogamous. Like, the opposite of monogamous. First they stop eating for two weeks, to get ready.”
“Not how I’ve ever gotten ready for a date,” murmurs CardaMom.
“Then they form a mating ball of one female and up to twenty-five males.”
“Twenty-five times ew!” cries Aspen.
“Each to their own,” says MaxiMum with a shrug.
Sumac wishes Grumps could hear this. One male + one female = nature’s way, my butt! She squints at the horizon, but there’s still no sign of the old man.
“Then the female goes off to give birth —”
“Lay her eggs,” Sumac corrects him.
“I likes eggs,” remarks Brian.
“Not eggs, live baby snakes, so nyah!” Wood tells Sumac. “Anything between three and ninety-eight of them. Bye, Mom, and they all wriggle off on their own.”
“Huh,” says MaxiMum. “So the two you saw together the other morning?”
“Unrelated, or maybe siblings who’ll never see each other again, and good riddance,” Wood says, looking around at his sisters.
“How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen,” says PopCorn in a posh falsetto.
“Iain, you’re quite the swimmer,” says MaxiMum.
Sumac jumps. The old man is right behind them, red-faced and dripping.
A couple with a baby and a toddler hover awkwardly at his side. They turn out to be from Lille, and soon CardaMom’s chatting away to them in French about how while they’re here they have to visit Montreal, where she lived when she was studying to be a lawyer and then being one.
“I was not lost,” Grumps keeps repeating gruffly.
“OK, Dad,” says PopCorn, “but they said when you came out of the lake you seemed to have no idea —”
“Getting my bearings, I was. Can I not have a moment to myself without busybodies poking their noses in the wrong end of the stick?”
Sumac frowns, trying to picture that.
“I be a egg salad swimmer,” Brian tells him.
“Yeah,” says MaxiMum, “no life jacket for Brian today, quite a breakthrough.”
Grumps mops himself with his towel.
After all that, thinks Sumac furiously, he doesn’t even care.
*
She’s in the Bookery the next afternoon, Googling symptoms old age. (She only goes into ugly old Spare Oom to sleep; it’s never going to be her real room.) Turns out Grumps was right about a certain number of lost marbles being normal at eighty-two. The list of things you lose — not just marbles but height, teeth, sight, hearing, etc., etc. — even makes her a bit sympathetic. Getting old sucks, big-time.
Then she hears another flush, and all her muscles tense up again. Grumps is showing what he thinks of the Lotterys’ yellow/brown policy by flushing every time he even walks past one of the bathrooms. Also, he leaves things in the wrong places just to be annoying, like sabotage: crackers in the refrigerator, sunglasses on Opal’s perch, milk jug on the bookshelf so it goes sour….
Books are strewn across the table that PapaDum upcycled from what was once somebody’s door: Fun Home, The Inconvenient Indian, Dementia: The Early Stages…. Aha. Sumac reaches for that one.