“Just a few last-minute repairs,” CardaMom calls back up from the Mess. “Play a game or something!”
They stare at each other across the carpeted expanse of the Loud Lounge.
“Tickle fight?” suggests Aspen.
Sumac shakes her head at her. Monopoly? No, she decides, that always leads to war.
“You know Napoleon games?” Brian asks Grumps.
“What’s that?” he says.
“Games from the old days, she means,” says Catalpa. “Like, Napoleonic times.”
And if Grumps says he isn’t from Napoleonic times, Sumac’s going to tell him that she wishes he was, so he’d be long buried by now.
“All sorts of games, we had,” Grumps says instead. “There was none of this screen time nonsense.”
“I wish I could live inside a screen, like Vanellope the Glitch,” says Aspen.
“What gameses?” Brian asks Grumps.
He shrugs. “Don’t remember off the top of my head. Cards, clapping things, skipping —”
“I know to skip!”
But Sumac’s appalled at the prospect of Grumps trying to skip. “We don’t have a rope up here.”
“Catalpa,” CardaMom calls from downstairs, “could you take Oak for a few minutes?”
Catalpa sighs and goes out.
Another longer silence. “Blind Man’s Buff,” says Grumps.
“Cool!” Aspen leaps up.
Well, if their grandfather’s willing to play a game with them, Sumac supposes they should go along with it, though it’s not going to be any fun.
Wood’s phone laughs hollowly in his pocket. “One sec.” He steps out of the Loud Lounge.
“Do you play it so when you’re tagged you’re It, or you’re out?” asks Sumac. She wants to get the rules straight so nobody will accuse her of being a cheetah.
The old man shrugs. “Suit yourself.”
“But what’s the rule, do you remember?” Sumac waits. “Will I look it up?” She wishes Wood would finish his call and come back and help.
“It doesn’t matter a — either way,” says Grumps, sounding so cranky that Sumac decides they’d better get on with it.
“We’ll go visit my Turret, will we?” That’s Catalpa talking to Oak on the landing.
For a blindfold, Sumac improvises with Brian’s bandana. Brian wants to be It, but then gets nervous and pulls the bandana off. So Sumac blindfolds herself scrupulously till she can’t see a thing.
“No chasing,” squeals Brian. There’s a thump, as if she’s backed into something.
“But, Brian,” says Aspen, “it’s a chasing game. Like Tag.”
“Do game but no chasing me.”
Sumac stretches out her hands and moves off, making sure to avoid the area where Brian’s squeaks are coming from. But she doesn’t want to touch Grumps either. So she steps cautiously, fingering her way around beanbags and chairs.
“You’d catch a fellow and feel his face,” says Grumps, “till you could make a stab at who he was.”
Sumac feels sick at the thought of stroking the old man’s bristly face, or having his fingers on hers.
“I’m bored,” she hears Aspen say, on the way out onto the landing.
“Come back,” Sumac pleads. “Aspen! You can be It if you like —”
She bumps into Brian, who peeps in delight.
Sumac pulls off the blindfold with relief.
“Not me. Grumps be It,” Brian insists.
Sumac fixes the blindfold on him, nervous-fingered.
“Not too tight,” he barks.
So she loosens the bandana. Now it’s sliding down his nose.
“I’ll do it myself.” He pushes her hands out of the way.
“I’m sick of waiting,” Aspen’s complaining to Catalpa next door in the Turret. “I don’t even eat cake.”
“Then what do you care how long it takes?” asks Catalpa.
Grumps makes the blindfold even tighter than Sumac did the first time, so the hem digs into his cheeks and flattens his ears. He edges around the room. Sumac ducks in to pull a chair out of his way so he won’t fall over it.
“Yoo-hoo,” Brian calls, taunting him.
Aspen must have left the door of the Turret open, because Oak crawls into the Loud Lounge now, gurgling wetly.
“We playing Blind Man’s Buff,” Brian calls out to him.
Sumac tiptoes up close to Grumps, touches him with one finger on his back, then runs. Then Grumps nearly catches Brian because she’s doubled over laughing, so Sumac has to yank her out of the way by her tank top.
“Impossible! The room’s too big, I’ll never find ye,” says Grumps. As he bends over, pawing the air, his cigarette pack falls out of his shirt pocket.
“Ew,” says Brian, picking it up.
“Where are my ciggies?” he demands.
“Dirty,” says Brian. “Put in the trash.”
“No you don’t, you little —”
“They kills you,” says Brian.
“I’ll kill you if you don’t give back my property!” He lurches in the direction of her voice with his arms out stiffly.
Oak thinks this is some kind of wonderful game. He’s crawling toward Grumps as —
The big hard boot comes down on his hand.
Their little brother doesn’t make a sound, at first. That’s how Sumac knows it’s bad. Oak’s mouth opens in a stunned O.