PopCorn hurries into the Mess, holding his phone to his ear. “Sure, of course, the next flight.” He must be talking to a stranger, because he sounds all serious and grown-up. Usually he puts on funny voices because he’s the Court Jester of Camelottery.
PapaDum, ladling out seconds, raises his bushy eyebrows to ask what it’s about. PapaDum’s fifty-nine — that’s the oldest in the whole family — so his eyebrows are getting monstrous, but he claims they’re the right size to match his beard.
PopCorn nods at him, not smiling — which again makes him seem not himself. He slides the phone into the back pocket of the shorts he made from cutting the legs off his favorite jeans after a chemistry experiment. “Got to go see your grandfather, poppets,” he announces, sitting down between Aspen and CardaMom. Then he winces as if that hurt his butt and fishes the phone out again.
“Up to heaven?” Brian asks, big-eyed.
“No, that’s my dad you’re thinking of,” MaxiMum tells her.
Aspen lets out a snigger.
Sumac glares at her sister, because it’s not funny that their grandfather from Jamaica’s dead, even if it did happen before most of them were alive.
Aspen can’t help it, though; she was born sniggering. And MaxiMum doesn’t get offended. (She says she’s not naturally calm and rational, like Spock in Star Trek; it’s from doing all that yoga.)
So PopCorn must be talking about PapaDum’s father, then. “But wouldn’t you just take the train if you’re visiting Dada Ji in Oakville?” asks Sumac.
“I wish!” PopCorn’s transferred his phone to the tiny pocket on the arm of his T-shirt, where it sticks out and waggles as he spoons up his breakfast.
“Duh,” Aspen tells her, “he must be flying to Montreal to see Baba on the reserve.”
“Not PapaDum’s dad, nor CardaMom’s,” says PopCorn in an oddly flat voice. “Mine.”
After a pause, CardaMom says, “You know: Iain, who PopCorn goes to see in Yukon every now and then?”
Sumac checks her mental files. “No he doesn’t.”
PopCorn’s eyes are on his spoon as it hunts a blueberry. “Well, more like once in a blue moon.”
“That grandfather’s not a real one,” says Aspen, lifting her feet to balance precariously on her ball. “He’s just in stories about making you chop up lots of kindling when you were small.”
Which sounds more like an evil sorcerer than a grandfather to Sumac.
“Oh, he’s real enough,” says PopCorn, licking maple syrup off one knuckle. “He just hasn’t been much of a grandfather.”
“To be fair,” says CardaMom, “he’s never even met the kids.”
To be fair is one of her pet phrases, because she used to be a lawyer — the fighting-for-justice kind.
Under the table, their brown mutt, Diamond, lets out a bark for no apparent reason. She’s been pining ever since the five biggest kids went to camp, and she won’t cheer up till Wood’s home.
Oak’s trying to eat his bib. Sumac gently tugs it out of his mouth. So this fourth grandfather has been nonactivated till now, she thinks. Dormant, like a volcano. “How come you only visit your dad once in a blue moon?”
“Yukon’s, ah, pretty far away,” says CardaMom.
MaxiMum gives her a look. “Let’s not be euphemistic.”
Sumac asks, “What’s —”
“Look it up,” says MaxiMum, as always, because she believes people should educate themselves. “It starts e-u.”
Sumac frowns. “Don’t you like your own dad?” she asks PopCorn.
“Oh, Sumac, Queen of the Pertinent Question.” He leans over to press her nose like a buzzer.
“Is pertinent like impertinent, like rude?” Aspen’s eager for it not to be her getting criticized for bad manners, for once. “I am looking it up,” she goes on, before MaxiMum can tell her to. “I’m opening up the dictionary right now….” She’s got MaxiMum by the ears and is pretending to read her short curls.
MaxiMum laughs, then puts on a computer-generated voice. “Pertinent, adjective: highly relevant to what’s being talked about.”
“He means Sumac’s a hammer that always hits the nail on the head,” says CardaMom fondly.
Sumac’s not sure she likes the sound of that. Though she supposes it’s better than being a hammer that hits the nail the wrong way and crumples it.
“Anyway, what did he say, hon?” PapaDum asks PopCorn.
“No, it was a nurse who called,” PopCorn tells him. “To tell me Dad set his house on fire.”
The other parents stare, and Aspen lets out an automatic burst of laughter.
“Just a small one, and he managed to put it out before the volunteer firefighters turned up.”
“Poor Iain,” cries CardaMom.
“Minor burns, that’s about it, from the sound of it,” says PopCorn.
“He play with candles?” asks Brian sternly.
PopCorn squeezes her small knee, which always has old Band-Aids dangling from it. “My dad doesn’t really play. Well, anyway, so I have to get to Whitehorse today, if there’s a seat, then drive to Faro….”
“Hang on,” says Sumac.
“Bring back presents?” asks Brian.
“Of course,” PopCorn tells her, rubbing her fuzzy-peach head.