The Lotterys Plus One Read online

  “I was under the impression your kind never touched pig,” says Grumps.

  PapaDum tilts his head to one side. “Are you thinking of Muslims, maybe?”

  “Orthodox Jews?” suggests Sic.

  A shrug from Grumps.

  “I was raised Hindu,” says PapaDum, “and my parents don’t eat meat, but as it happens, I’m an omnivore.”

  Grumps points at his son’s plate. “Anyway, I thought you were a vegetarian.” He pronounces it like a foreign word.

  “What can I say, Dad? I can’t live without the very occasional, humanely raised, crispy rasher.” PopCorn folds another slide of bacon into his mouth. “Do I contradict myself?” he goes on in what Sumac recognizes as his poetry voice. “Very well, then, I contradict myself! I am large, I contain multitudes …”

  “You’ll be large, all right, if you carry on stuffing your face like that,” says Grumps.

  PopCorn closes his eyes briefly, then chews on.

  Sumac realizes something: This old man probably made up his mind to hate it at Camelottery before he even walked in the door.

  Aspen slurps the bottom of her protein shake noisily and leaps off her ball.

  “Take a Lot before you go.” MaxiMum holds out the old top hat. (The Lotterys used to put their Lots in a Tibetan singing bowl, but the hat is way more Hogwarts.)

  “I’m going to give Slate a sponge bath after just-super-quickly-checking if anyone’s attacked my portal. He’s horribly sweaty.” Aspen takes Slate out of her hoodie pocket and scratches his white belly. He plants one of his nibbly kisses on her chin.

  “Bathing him doesn’t count as housework,” says Sumac, “because he’s your rat, and it’s fun.”

  “And no screen time till you’re done, Aspen, no matter what state your portal’s in,” says MaxiMum, shaking the hat till Aspen takes a Lot.

  “Drop Everything and Read.” Aspen scowls at her card. “CardaMom, trade?”

  “You don’t even know what I’ve got,” CardaMom points out as she plucks a Lot out of the hat.

  Aspen yanks it out of her hand. “Fill a Toy Basket. Deal!”

  “I get to drop everything and read The Orenda!” CardaMom punches the air in satisfaction.

  “And don’t fill the basket with just one big cuddly,” PapaDum warns Aspen.

  PopCorn is scanning the listings in the city freesheet. “Bambini, who wants to come hear an Australian aboriginal country-and-western singer-songwriter tonight?”

  Sic looks over his shoulder and pokes the page. “There’s a postpunk hip-hop crew in the mainspace, I’d go to that while you’re upstairs with the folkies.”

  “That works.”

  “Cat Girl?” asks Sic.

  Catalpa’s only just come downstairs in her long black nightshirt. “Unless I’m out crochet-tagging,” she yawns.

  She and a bunch of other fourteen-year-olds are currently obsessed with making colorful patches to cover bike stands and pipes and park benches. Like graffiti but with yarn.

  “And for your challenge,” says PopCorn, “you can each review it on the family blog.”

  Sumac goes to take just one more piece of bacon….

  But Grumps is already eating the last one. His jaw moves like he’s not even enjoying it.

  Wood dumps everything compostable in the metal bucket and sets down the rest on a plate for Diamond. CardaMom’s scrubbing the grill pan; she flicks her braid out of the scummy water. MaxiMum puts three pills beside Grumps’s plate.

  “That stuff’s not doing a thing for me,” he says.

  “Mm,” she says, “the doctor said they take a few weeks to kick in.”

  “Giving me bad dreams.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Iain. The side effects usually fade with time.”

  “Hard on the stomach too.”

  “If you take them after a meal, like right now,” says MaxiMum, “that should help.”

  Finally, he sticks out his lizard tongue and swallows them. (MaxiMum’s so persistent, it occurs to Sumac, she could probably talk anyone into jumping off a cliff.)

  “Kapow!” shrieks Opal from his perch.

  Grumps glares over his shoulder at the bird.

  “You likes parrots?” Brian asks him.

  A sniff. “In their place.”

  She looks confused. “Opal gots lots of places.”

  “I was thinking of the jungle. How do ye manage?”

  “Manage?” repeats MaxiMum.

  “Hygienically.” His red-and-purple nose wrinkles. “With it flapping hither and yon and dropping its whatsits.”

  “Oh, Opal doesn’t fly,” says PapaDum.

  “And don’t worry, PapaDum’s trained him to go on a sheet of paper on that shelf there,” says MaxiMum.

  “PapaDum’s Opal’s flock leader, that’s like the alpha dog,” Wood explains.

  “See his squinchy wing?” Aspen jumps up to stroke the left one. “He got smuggled in a suitcase and it damaged him. We’re his rescue family.”

  “Something wrong with all of them?” asks Grumps.

  The Lotterys stare at him.

  He nods at Diamond, lying on her cushion near Wood. “That crippled mutt, and the cat who’s scared of his own shadow….”

  “Quartz is a she, and she’s just not as sociable as her sister, Topaz,” says Sumac, “but there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert.”

  “And if you bothered to actually watch Diamond,” says Wood, “she moves better on three legs than most dogs do on four.”

  A leaden silence. Two days, thinks Sumac; the grandfather’s only been here since the evening before last, but he’s like a gray thundercloud hovering over the house.

  The old man plonks his plate beside the sink.

  “Does Grumps not have to pick a Lot? Is he too old for chores?” Aspen asks.

  Sumac glares dragon fire at her sister. He’s not meant to know what they call him.

  “What did you say?” he demands.

  “Nothing,” says Aspen weakly.

  MaxiMum and CardaMom are exchanging a look.

  “Grumps, you said, I heard you.”

  “It’s kind of like Gramps, you know, grandfather,” says Sumac.

  “It is not. A grump is a cranky puss,” says the old man.

  He leaves the Mess without another word. And without anyone asking him to take a Lot, Sumac notices. Clearly he’s going to be like the king and the rest of them are the servants.

  The parents don’t comment.

  After a minute, PapaDum picks File Paperwork, but he says that’s so tedious and swaps it for PopCorn’s Hang Laundry on the Clotheslines. MaxiMum says she’ll keep Weed Veggie Beds. (More of a pleasure than a job, for her.)

  Brian gets to choose a green card (which means an easy one), and Sumac reads it for her: “Fill Birdbaths.”

  Brian nods importantly. “What for Oak?”

  “Ah …” Oak’s not really old enough to be a lot of use yet, but Brian insists on including her little brother in everything, so Sumac offers him the hat. Oak seizes a fistful of cards. She extracts a green one from his sticky grip. It actually says Clear the Floor of Your Bedroom, but she thinks for a second, then says, “Dance,” because that’s one of his talents.

  “Want to dance, Oaky?” asks Brian. “Dance?”

  He jolts up and down in his high chair and lets out a high-pitched shriek.

  Lastly, Sumac draws a card of her own. “Clean Toilets,” she reads aloud in a tone of woe. “All four, seriously?”

  CardaMom’s a soft touch. “You start on the third floor, me in the basement,” she offers, “and I’ll race you to the second floor.”

  MaxiMum’s rinsing plates with one hand and stacking them in the nearer dishwasher with the other. “And listen, kids, we all have to be more responsible about picking up things off the ground.”

  “Especially on the stairs,” says PapaDum. “I just read that households with young children have the highest rate of falls, but the family members most likely
to be hurt are those over sixty-five, because their bones are more brittle.”

  Sumac thinks of peanut brittle going snap. If Grumps had to go to the hospital, would she get her room back? She wonders how long people live after eighty-two, then feels terrible and tries to forget she even thought it.

  * * *

  Passing the door of her old room, Sumac hears MaxiMum inside. “This was Sumac’s room, but we can repaint it however you’d prefer, Iain, it’s no trouble.”

  They’re going to paint over the mural that PopCorn did for her when she was five?

  “Sumac. Is she the gorgeous one?” she hears Grumps asking.

  Sumac grits her teeth. He’s thinking of Catalpa. He could at least say something like, How kind of her to lend me her lovely bedroom.

  “I find all our children gorgeous,” says MaxiMum. “Sumac’s very precise, thoughtful, responsible….”

  She’d usually be glad to hear this, but right now they sound like dog qualities, and she’d swap all of them for one gorgeous.

  “She’s the wee oriental, then? Or is she an Indian like Cardigan, whatshername, the other lady?”

  He means CardaMom. So Grumps is one of those white people who describe everybody-whose-skin-isn’t-exactly-like-theirs as if they’re another species.

  Instead of answering, MaxiMum says, pleasantly, “You’ve got a multicolored family now, Iain.”

  “Like a bag of Smarties,” he says. And not as if he’s a big fan of Smarties. “Who are you to my son again?”

  Can he have forgotten, Sumac wonders? Is this a lost marble? Or is he just being rude?

  “Friend for twenty years, coparent of seven kids,” says MaxiMum.

  Talking to this man is a sort of obstacle course for not losing your temper, Sumac decides. Well, he’s met his match in MaxiMum.

  Sumac peeks into her poor abandoned room. Two cases stand beside the chair like guards. Maybe one of the brain marbles Grumps is missing is how to unpack a bag? She notices her five-by-five Rubik’s Cube in the corner, behind him, and she wants to retrieve it but doesn’t dare.

  * * *

  “See, kunuk is ancient Sumerian for seal,” Sumac tells Isabella, “and for more than one of something they just stuck .ene on the end, so these are kunuk.ene.” They’re in the Mess making clay seals to bake in the stove. Isabella and Sumac are doing cylinder seals like the Mesopotamians wore on strings around their wrists so if they wanted to seal something quickly they could just roll the picture on.

  “Remind me why you’re trying to learn this language if everyone who ever spoke it is dead?” asks her friend, folding up the sleeves of her dress twice before she picks up the steak knife. Today Isabella’s nails are emerald green.

  “Why not?” says Sumac with a shrug. “It’s all brainercise. Next time someone assumes I was adopted from China and asks me am I taking Mandarin classes, I can gobsmack them by saying, No, actually, Sumerian.”

  “Ha! What are you carving — fairies?”

  “Duh, it’s a banquet scene,” says Sumac. “There’s PapaDum with his big beard, see? And the rest of us, all the way down to Oak crawling. I was going to arrange us by height, with MaxiMum first, but then I decided that in ancient times people would have been more impressed by age, because you had to be pretty clever or lucky to live long.”

  “Mine’s going to be all flowers,” says Isabella, cutting into the clay.

  Aspen feels her way into the Mess, blindfolded with a long sock. (She’s studying the senses with MaxiMum by doing without one of them at a time.) When she bangs her head on a cupboard, she pulls the sock off. “Hey, I want to do one of them.”

  Sumac represses a sigh and cuts her sister a slice from the clay block.

  “Why isn’t PopCorn helping us?” Isabella complains.

  He usually does, with art, not to mention the fact that Mesopotamia was meant to be his and Sumac’s special Lottafun … but Sumac supposes that’s gone down the tubes. “He’s taking his dad to a Center for Geriatric Neurology,” she grumbles.

  “What’s that?” asks Isabella.

  “Somewhere old people get tested, like old cars.”

  “I bet they diagnose him with terminal crabbypantsitis,” jokes Aspen.

  “He keeps talking as if PapaDum’s just arrived from India instead of having been here since he was eleven. And he’s rude about the food. He peered into the salad PapaDum was making this morning like he was looking for worms,” Sumac tells her friend, “and then he said, Not my cup of tea.”

  “Is there weird stuff in the salad, though?”

  “Well, goat cheese, beets, arugula,” says Sumac, “a bit of freekeh.”

  Isabella’s lip curls up. “What the freak is freekeh?”

  “A supergrain, nuttyish.”

  Isabella pretends to retch. “What I’m curious about is, will his eyebrows ever grow back?”

  “I doubt it,” says Sumac with a shrug. “Your cells aren’t as growy when you’re old.”

  Aspen’s cut herself a much thicker chunk of clay, and she’s making a cylinder like a can of beans. Her rat looks out from the pocket of her pajamas.

  “Slate,” Sumac scolds him, “are you responsible for all those gouges and scratches?”

  “That’s my carving,” says Aspen.

  “What’s it meant to be?” asks Isabella, leaning so close that her braids almost touch it.

  “Just abstract, like Jackson Pollock,” Aspen says smugly.

  She always says Jackson Pollock when she can’t be bothered doing proper art, because he’s famous for putting his canvases on the floor and splatting paint all over them. And she gets away with it, because if you use words like proper art at Camelottery, PopCorn says, Proper, plopper, it’s all about the journey.

  “Cool idea, though, Sumac, to let him help,” Aspen adds, setting Slate on the table and pressing one of his tiny paws onto the clay.

  “Put him away!” Isabella’s stepped back, shuddering.

  Aspen gives Sumac a your-pal’s-pathetic look.

  Sumac scowls back at her. Isabella may be a bit of a cowardy custard, but at least she doesn’t do armpit farts like that boy Aspen keeps bringing home.

  Sumac keeps picking at her banqueting figures, but she’s only making them worse. Art’s not one of her fortes. And grrr, THE LOTTERYS should be in mirror writing to make the words come out right when she uses the seal! She can’t seem to concentrate today. She smears the letters with her knife and starts rewriting them.

  Now Wood walks in barefoot and slaps down a wet pike as long as his arm.

  “Hola, Wood,” says Isabella, giving him a finger wave.

  He barely nods as he takes his pocketknife to the fish and scrapes out its guts.

  Isabella’s all agog. “Did you seriously just catch that?”

  “Yeah. Cloudy mornings are ideal, because the fish don’t go deep to avoid the sun.”

  Sumac suspects her best friend of liking Wood, but she’s never asked, because she doesn’t want to know.

  “So hey, I hear you’re being an Environmental Steward this summer, is that as important as it sounds?” asks Isabella.

  “It’s mostly mulching plants,” mutters Sumac.

  “Mulching is crucial,” says Wood.

  Isabella lays her head on the counter, to look the fish in the eye, while Wood stuffs it with apple slices that keep sliding back out. “Ugly bugly!”

  “By pike standards, you’re hideous,” he points out.

  She lets out an outraged gasp.

  “Flat nose, tiny mouth, no spots or shine …”

  Isabella flounces off and examines the little plastic bags held to the refrigerator by magnets. “Wood, June 22 … Diamond, July 13 … Wood, July 13 …”

  “They’re his tick collection,” explains Aspen, stabbing her thumbnails into the clay.

  Wood goes to the refrigerator, and with one fish-bloody finger he points out the tiny brown bug in one bag. “All the ones that have bit me or my dog this summer.”
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br />   “Have bitten,” Sumac corrects him.

  He ignores that. “I yank them out with a tweezers,” he tells Isabella, “keep them to show the doctor in case I develop symptoms of, like, Lyme disease, encephalitis, that kind of thing.”

  “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard,” Isabella marvels. She starts lining up the finger-puppet magnets in pairs. “Who’s the new girl with the scarf?”

  “Frida somebody, a painter who got literally speared on the handrail of a bus,” says Aspen with relish, thumping her seal onto the baking sheet.

  “I’ll put her with … Sherlock Holmes,” says Isabella. “And Mr. Mandela, who would you like to dance with today? Let’s say … Jane Austen.”

  That makes Sumac hoot.

  Isabella comes over to look at Sumac’s cylinder. “Shouldn’t you add your grandfather to the banquet, though, so he doesn’t feel left out?”

  Wood doesn’t say anything. Nor Aspen, for once.

  “There’s no more room,” says Sumac through her teeth.

  At dinner on the Derriere, the Lotterys who went wreck diving can’t talk about anything but the Sligo. Wood’s sulking that he didn’t get to go because the wreck was twenty-one meters down, and he hasn’t gotten his Junior Advanced Open Water certification yet.

  “It’s a triple-masted schooner from 1860,” Sic tells their grandfather, “with a nearly intact hull. We saw its actual stove and wheel!”

  No answer from the old man. Maybe he’s a bit deaf? By the time you’re eighty-two, Sumac figures, bits of you must be worn out.

  “It was deeply mysterious,” says Catalpa, “apart from dumb divers swarming all over it and posing for selfies.” She’s wearing so much eyeliner this evening, she looks damaged.

  “Deeply,” repeats Aspen with a snigger. “The shipwreck at the bottom of the lake was deeply mysterious! Get it?”

  Catalpa closes her eyes for a second, which is code for Somebody take this child away before I smack her.

  “Get it?” asks Aspen again.

  “We all get it, beta,” murmurs PapaDum, lifting pieces of sizzling meat with the long tongs. (He upcycled the barbecue out of a wheelbarrow they found one Garbage Night. It’s really handy for wheeling the ashes to the compost.)

  “Piece of chicken, Dad?” asks PopCorn. “Sausage? Halloumi kebab? That’s cheese.”