It’s exciting to be the only kid coming along on PopCorn’s homecoming trip … but it’s not actually a very exciting trip so far. Nine hours in the air, five hours in the rental car, and all the time the Yukon sky stays white because they’re so far north. Sumac conks out in the backseat before she’s seen anything interesting at all, and barely wakes when PopCorn carries her into the B&B.
In the morning the sun’s high already, and PopCorn’s walking around talking on the phone to somebody called Melissa. “The thing is, Melissa, I fly back to Toronto tomorrow and my dad needs to see the doctor on an urgent basis, so how do you suggest we might solve this?”
Sumac stops listening and pulls The Popularity Papers: Book Seven out of her backpack.
At breakfast it turns out she and PopCorn are the only two people staying in the B&B. The clock on the wall has numbers that face backward and the hands aren’t moving; it says Relax, You’re on Yukon Time. It’s fun choosing from all the different little boxes of cereal — Sumac mixes brightly colored loops with chocolatey ones shaped like rockets — but they taste kind of sickening. PopCorn doesn’t have any, just so much coffee that his hands shake.
The view out the window’s like a painting: mountains and grass, no people. “Where’s Faro?”
“This is it,” PopCorn tells her with an odd kind of smile. “Population four hundred on a busy day. When I was your age, it had the biggest open-pit lead and zinc mine in the world, but then the mine shut down.”
“Wow. Four hundred, that’s … almost nobody.”
On the way to the grandfather’s, Sumac watches for wildlife but only spots a crow.
“More moose than humans live around here. I spotted two near the highway last night,” says PopCorn.
“You should have woken me!”
He shakes his head. “As you’ll learn if you have your own, my love, rule number one of parenthood is never wake a sleeping child.”
There’s an old man on a porch who seems to be making a chair out of skinny branches. Sumac hasn’t seen any children in Faro yet. PopCorn drives across water with canoeists shooting down it, which reminds her: “Hey, we saw this mural of Mesopotamians escaping across a river holding inflated animal skins, like personal flotation devices.”
“Crafty,” murmurs PopCorn, in an absentminded way. He turns sharply into a driveway and shuts the motor off. “Vel,” he says in his best Transylvanian accent, “velcome to my humble childhood home.”
Sumac thought it would be a log cabin, maybe, or quaint, at least. But it’s just a regular kind of ugly house.
PopCorn presses the end of her nose. “Beep!”
She slaps him away. “Why do you do that?”
“Because it’s cute as a button.” He does it again before she can ward him off. Then he drumrolls on his shorts and calls out like in Hide and Seek: “Ready or not, here we come….”
The front door’s not locked.
As soon as they step into the hall, the stink of smoke gets into Sumac’s throat.
“Dad?” calls PopCorn.
No answer.
“You wait outside so you’re not breathing in the toxins,” he tells Sumac.
She’s glad to retreat to the front yard and read in the sunshine.
PopCorn comes out about ten minutes later talking about drywall with Frankenstein’s monster. Well, a tall, bony old man in steel-capped work boots, jeans, and a flannel shirt that looks unbearably hot, balding, with gray hair, no eyebrows (just little scratchy bits) and a straggly gray beard. His nose is all swollen with red-and-purple lines across it, and his hands are bandaged.
You shouldn’t judge on appearances, Sumac reminds herself.
The grandfather stares at her.
PopCorn breaks off to say, in an oddly formal way, “Dad, this is Sumac.”
“Smack?”
“Sumac.” He leans on the first syllable. “Like the tree. The fourth of our seven.”
“Fifth,” says Sumac, correcting him, but the word hardly comes out, she’s so nervous suddenly. “Hi.”
The old man’s eyes are shifting between the two of them and Sumac can read his mind: She and PopCorn don’t actually look related, because her ancestors are from the Philippines and Germany, and his are Scottish all the way back.
“OK. Well, they’re expecting you, expecting us, at the nursing center, Dad,” says PopCorn, “so we’d better head over.”
“I was seen to the night before last.” The grandfather holds up one bandaged hand like an Egyptian mummy. His voice is hoarse, with an accent as strong as if he never left Glasgow.
“The dressing probably needs changing, and I’ve managed to wangle you an appointment with the doctor.”
“I’m all right.” He makes a checking-his-watch movement, but the bandage is in the way. “I play golf, the mornings.”
“Not this morning,” murmurs PopCorn, opening the passenger door for him.
“I’ll take my own car, thank you.”
“C’mon, Dad, why waste the gas?”