Come back! She wails it in her head.
Last night, she should have said loud and clear that Grumps stepping on Oak’s finger was a total accident. The kind of thing that happens in a big chaotic house all the time; the kind of thing that’s nobody’s fault.
But this is Sumac’s fault: Grumps running off. He’s had so much to put up with. Getting his eyebrows burned off, being yanked away from his own life and plonked down in the middle of an unrecognizable one. The unflushed pee, crippled pets, strange vegetables, doors banging, kids underfoot, everybody talking at the same time in smart-ass ways about things he’s never heard of. Losing his marbles and being humiliated and poison ivied. Grumps put up with all that, with everything, until Poison Sumac, plotting to stick him in a so-called home, told the whole family that he was a brute who deliberately stomped on their little boy’s finger….
She’s sweating with panic, despite the chill of the airport.
Grumps is probably feeling just as awful, for different reasons. Guilty about Oak, and miserable about everything, and stressed out by these hordes of people. Right now he’d be trying to get away from everybody and find some room to breathe.
There’s a long plate-glass wall over there. Sumac can see the city skyline, gray against pink, and the red lights coming on to mark the Big-Mac-speared-on-an-umbrella silhouette of the CN Tower. Such an alien sight for a small-town man like Grumps.
There? Right by the window, beside a white pillar, where there’s a bit of space. Just a sleeve visible behind a cart with five massive suitcases stacked on it.
Sumac takes a step to the left, craning. She almost doesn’t want it to be him.
That’s Grumps’s balding head leaning against the glass. Knobbled fingers locked together, as if he’s worn out, or waiting. Not the best of grandfathers. Not even an averagely good one. Not the one any of the Lotterys would have chosen, or he them. But he’s theirs.
Aspen’s made binoculars of her hands, and she’s humming the Mission: Impossible theme, so she doesn’t even notice Sumac going.
She walks over very slowly. “Hi, Grumps.”
The old man blinks, startles. She sees his mouth struggle. “Sue. Sue?”
“Sumac, the tree. But people sometimes hear it as Sue — like, Sue MacClottery,” she adds, just to keep the conversation going. Sumac always imagines Sue as a regular girl, an all-rounder, wonderfully average.
“Knew some McLaughterys back in Glasgow.”
That surprises her. “It’s a real surname?”
“McLaughtery? Of course. A sight realer than Lottery, let me tell you.”
That almost makes Sumac smile. “How do you spell it?”
“Like laughter, but it rhymes with otter. If you ever go to Scotland,” says Grumps, “you could introduce yourself as Sue McLaughtery.”
She’ll travel to Scotland some day, Sumac decides, then go south to England and have more laughs with her cousin Seren. She’ll go right around the world on her own, and she won’t be just one of the Lotterys, she’ll be Sumac Lottery. (Or even Sue McLaughtery, if she prefers.)
A plane takes off, heading west. Grumps’s eyes follow it. “They canceled my blasted credit card,” he says, as if to himself.
Sumac thinks about all the special powers you get when you turn into an adult: credit cards and driver’s licenses and stuff. She never knew they could get taken away again when you’re old. “Were you trying to go back to Faro?”
A nod. “My wee house. My car. Still got my driver’s license.” He pats his back pocket. Then scowls. “Unless they’ve canceled that too.”
“They just want you to be —” Safe? Well? Happy? Sumac doesn’t know what to say. “We want you to stay.”
His dribbly eyes fix on her.
Only now does she register the shouting in the background. “Sumac!” “Sumac!” Her family must think she’s lost too now. “We all came to find you,” she tells Grumps.
“What, the whole lot of ye?”
“Sumac!”
She turns around and waves until they see her.
All the way home in the van — the one Grumps isn’t in — Sumac says nothing. She’s so tired, she’s dizzy.
Instead of dinner, it’s buttered toast all round. White bread, even; PapaDum must have bought it specially for Grumps.
After Oak is asleep — and Brian has refused to go to bed or even get into pajamas, despite the fact that Sumac’s read her Room on the Broom three times — there’s a Fleeting at the Trampoline. (Well away from the house, so Grumps won’t hear them, Sumac guesses.)
Brian’s lying on her back in her fire truck in the middle, waving her arms and legs, a stranded beetle. Aspen is moonwalking around the trampoline to try to flip Brian the right way up.
“Yesterday we called Sunset Vista Residence,” MaxiMum begins.
Sumac flinches. The one she showed in her awful presentation? The one her family gave her such grief about?
“The one with the movie theater?” asks Catalpa.