“Wow! And snowflake curtains,” cries Isabella, pointing. “This room’s way more grown-up than your old one.”
Sumac gazes around. She’s never going to do or plan anything babyish or dumb in here.
“Oo, look,” says Isabella, face pressed to the window. “Wood’s got a giant bow, like Robin Hood.”
“Don’t get him started on how he carved it himself out of yew,” Sumac warns her.
The doorbell, far below. After a few seconds, CardaMom yells, “Somebody get that!”
Sumac notices a quote in PapaDum’s neat capitals on a mirror as she hurries downstairs and through the Hall of Mirrors to answer the door:
IF YOU’RE FINISHED CHANGING,
YOU’RE FINISHED.
Underneath someone’s added, barely legibly,
All pigs fed and ready to fly.
It’s Gram (MaxiMum’s mom), who’s driven into town with two trays of her tamarind balls — they look like donuts, but they’re fruit paste — and a bag of “totally uneducational toys, heh heh heh,” according to Aspen. Who pops a whole tamarind ball into her mouth, then chokes because it’s a hot-pepper one.
Dada Ji (recently turned ninety, but the same as ever in his black turban) and Dadi Ji arrive next with one box of lurid orangey-yellow jalebi, and another full of diamonds of cashew-paste barfi, which Sumac enjoys so long as she doesn’t think about the name. They’re decorated with vark, which is actual silver beaten very thin; you’d think it would poison you, but apparently not.
The shaggy lawn behind Camelottery is filling up. Mrs. Zhao and her silently smiling husband arrive with a huge tureen of chicken feet soup, which gets Gram very excited because she grew up on the stuff in Jamaica.
Brian zooms by, her Spitfire wings poking several guests in the butt. Aspen is showing off Slate’s party tricks, and Opal keeps shrieking “Meh!” No sign of the cats: This crowd is too much even for Topaz.
“I heard Mrs. Zhao telling MaxiMum that Sic’s a hard worker and will go far,” Wood reports.
“No!” says Catalpa. “Don’t dare tell him. If that head swells any more, it’ll burst.”
Quinn gazes at her as if she’s the wittiest girl he’s ever met as well as the gorgeousest.
“Is Grumps being civil to the guests?” Sumac wonders.
“I heard him make some crack to Jagroop about how he’d thought he wasn’t going to have any grandkids, and now he’s got them sprouting like weeds,” says Wood. “But hey, weeds are just flowers that grow easily.”
Sumac notices Grumps is deep in conversation with Gram now, so she sidles up to check he’s not calling her colored or anything.
“Packed off to Rothesay — that’s on an island,” he’s saying, “with no more than a toothbrush and a clean pair of scants. Exasperated, like.”
Gram has her head on one side. “You felt … exasperated?”
He shakes his head. “Ejected? No, that’s James Bond with his ejector seat.”
What’s he on about?
“Thousands of us weans were, for fear of the, you know —” He mimes what looks to Sumac like tomatoes dropping and bursting apart. “Mask, tag with my number on it … Exiled, is that it?”
PapaDum’s parents are hovering on the edge of the conversation. “I must confess to feeling somewhat exiled when we came to Canada too, in 1965,” says Dada Ji.
Gram nods. “I had to rush out to buy the children snowsuits.”
“No, Canada was later,” Grumps corrects them. “I’m talking about when I was a boy, nine years old, got shunted —” A gasp of frustration. “Tip of my tongue. Vacuumed?”
Sumac is still thinking about the exploding tomatoes. A mask, what kind of mask? “In the war?” she guesses.
Grumps turns on her. “Of course, otherwise there’d have been no risk of us getting blown to smithereens!”
There’s no use expecting this man to be grateful when you figure out what he means.
“Ah, yes, the Blitz, very good, dear, you know your history,” says Dada Ji, nodding at Sumac. “You were evacuated, then, Iain?”
“Evacuated, that’s it!” Grumps roars it so loudly that Mrs. Zhao gives him a repressive look from right across the Wild.
Sumac’s heard of the Blitz, but she didn’t know it happened to Glasgow as well as London. Now she comes to think about it, the whole island of Britain isn’t very long; not far for a Spitfire to fly, or whatever the Nazis had. So it’s happened to Grumps twice: transported from his real life to a brand-new one, without being consulted. Are we his Blitz, she wonders. Or maybe dementia’s the Blitz, and we’re the island he’s been evacuated to?
He’s talking to Mr. Zhao now, she notices, and rubbing Diamond’s head. “Goes better on three legs than most dogs on four,” he’s saying.
PapaDum rings a special bell, which means it’s time for the Rakhi ceremony.