*
Brian’s been watching Grumps with a scowl all week, in case he’s going to stamp on Oak again. Finally she announces at dinner, “I don’t be hating you now.”
An awful silence, and then Grumps says, “Thanks.”
“Oak don’t be hating you too.”
“Glad to hear it.” Grumps shakes Oak by the hand (not the one with the taped fingers). Then he does the craziest thing: He folds his huge, brown-blotched, red-veined ear into its hole, holds his nose, and blows, and the ear pops out.
Oak laughs so much his diaper leaks.
Either Grumps is making a mega effort to fit in, Sumac thinks, or his pills are helping to slow down the hole-forming in his brain. CardaMom says maybe the Lotterys are just getting to know the man better. (Like, those stuffed heads on his wall — the wolverine and the caribou and the sheep — it turns out he didn’t shoot them at all; he just collected them at yard sales.) Also, the parents are getting the hang of taking turns keeping an eye on Grumps, without him noticing and losing his temper. He even seems to be eating more of PapaDum’s weirdy salads, but maybe PapaDum’s making them a bit less weirdy so Grumps will eat them?
Their grandfather comes along to the next Fleeting and puts toilets at the top of the agenda. The Lotterys compromise on a flush-every-time policy, but with a dam installed in each tank to reduce the water used by about a third. (Brian’s totally confused now; Sumac thinks her little sister may be flushing before she pees as well as after, and sometimes — judging by startled yelps that are heard from the washroom — during.)
Grumps still spends a lot of the time on his own in his room. (Several Lotterys have offered to paint over the sky and clouds and sun, but he keeps saying not to bother, so Sumac suspects he likes it.) But he’s sometimes to be found down in the Orchestra Pit — turns out he can play the piano pretty well — or reading the paper on the Derriere, or even (slowly) walking on the treadmill.
Grumps and Brian keep those marbles she stole from Toytally Awesome in a tin hidden in the Wild so Oak won’t swallow them, and they get them out every afternoon when Oak’s kaput, to talk very boringly about bosses and puries. Brian seems to be winning all Grumps’s puries off him, or maybe he’s letting her? Then every evening after dinner, MaxiMum smokes her one cigarette with Grumps, and Wood and Diamond invite him to come check out what’s new in the Ravine.
In his poker-faced way, Grumps teases Catalpa about the length of Quinn’s hair and whether the boy is actually capable of speaking or was born without a tongue. When Catalpa finally agrees to let her family hear Game of Tones’s cover version of “Happy” (which Sic’s already tracked down online and pronounced “not as excruciating as you’d expect”), Grumps nods along seriously as if he’s listening to Bach.
Sumac hears him remarking to Aspen that she looks the spit of her grandmother, the first Elspeth. She’s about to tell him that Aspen’s bios are CardaMom and PapaDum, actually, so Aspen didn’t get any of her genes from him or his dead wife … and then she decides this is probably another button-your-lip moment.
As for Sumac, she mostly talks books with him — especially old ones. He gets quite excited about her reading The Princess and the Goblin because of George MacDonald being Scottish, and all the stuff about mining; it turns out Grumps was a mining engineer for forty years.
All this time he’s had the impression that Sumac’s about twelve, “but undersized, you know, from the orphanage.”
“I wasn’t ever in an orphanage, remember?”
“Oh, aye,” says Grumps, as if he’s doubting Sumac’s memory but doesn’t want to call her on it.
Anyway, she supposes it’s a compliment that he thought she was mature enough to be twelve instead of nine.
*
On Sunday evening Sumac passes Sic doing up his Day-Glo laces in the Hall of Mirrors and adding “Vrum-vrum with Lin-Lin” to the Where Board.
“Who’s Lin-Lin?” she asks.
“It means beauty of a tinkling bell,” he says with a hollow laugh.
“Mrs. Zhao?”
“Dui,” says Sic with a nod, so that must mean yes. “Spotted it on her phone bill.” He’s set himself a challenge of squeezing the max out of his driving sessions by learning a hundred words in Mandarin. “Beauty of a pounding gong, more like. Check your mirror!” He imitates Mrs. Zhao’s stern accent. “Eyes where you wanna go!”
“Isn’t she getting any less bossy, then?”
Sic pats her shoulder. “Adults don’t change, kiddo, you just get used to them, figure out some workarounds.”
“And is she used to you yet?” Sumac wonders, noticing his socks: one gray Argyle, one Winnie the Pooh.
Her brother grins. “Now she’s got her head around my having two moms and two dads, she insists I should obey all of them all the time — like, filial piety times four.”