“I adore the smell of paint,” says Isabella, sniffing. “So classy, two walls white and two silver, and the fairy lights everywhere.”
“They’re icicles, see?” Sumac shows her their tips.
“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.
Sic reads aloud from a book of Indian legends about when Shachi tied a thread around her husband Indra’s wrist to boost his powers of mind and help him defeat demons. The story sounds a bit like a Marvel comic, but that’s probably just the way Sic says it.
“I thought the party was about brothers, not husbands,” mutters Aspen in Sumac’s ear.
She shrugs, watching Grumps and wondering whether anything could boost his powers of mind at this stage. Thinking about her own demons of nastiness and meanness, she tells them: Begone!
Oak finds having his Rakhi threads tied on a hoot and keeps hiding his fat wrist behind his back so it takes all the girls and women a while to get it done. Aspen does vicious tickle attacks while tying hers on the boys and men in her family, so that slows things down too.
“May all be happy,” Dada Ji recites,
May all be free from ills,
May all behold only the good,
May none be in distress.
At which point, PopCorn starts crying.
Grumps turns his head away, looking mortified.
“You no need to pee now,” Brian tells PopCorn.
“That’s a relief,” he whispers, and blows his nose.
“And then you pray for your brothers’ well-being and happiness,” Dada Ji tells the women and girls. “May you be well and happy —”
“May you be well and happy,” they chorus.
Wood and Aspen exchange hideous grimaces from across the grass.
“And then, menfolk, you take this pledge. I vow to protect my sisters —”
“I vow to protect my sisters,” they chant.
“Protect? Isn’t that a bit patronizing?” Catalpa wants to know.
CardaMom claps a hand over her black-lipsticked mouth.
“— and help them to climb over any obstacles —”
“— and help them to climb over any obstacles —”
“Or kick them over,” yells Catalpa.
Aspen laughs and does a karate kick, accidentally getting Dadi Ji in the stomach.
There’s a last-minute kerfuffle when Brian insists on being a brother and having threads tied on her. But then she wants to tie one on Oak too, because “I be sister and brother.” Then Aspen remembers that Slate and Opal probably have litter- and hatch-sisters that they miss, though tying bracelets on a rat and a parrot is likely to be a fiddly business. Luckily Sumac has extra Rakhi in her pocket and hands them out to anyone who wants one, because really, who cares so long as the threads get tied.
Authors steal ideas all the time. But like the tiny family in Mary Norton’s series The Borrowers, we prefer to call it borrowing. Here’s a grateful shout-out to the folks, young and old, from whom I’ve borrowed most:
Debra Westgate for professional advice on kids in all their wonderful oddity, and Gráinne Ní Dhúill, Aoife and Fionnuala Westgate for snail races; Astra Vainio-Mattila (reader extraordinaire and member of my first-ever
Focus Group); Helen, Asa, and Sophie Thomas, and Julian Patrick for tales of Camp Wanapitei; Tamara Sugunasiri for asking for a book like this (I planned it over the course of one of your great dinners); Derek Scott for Pied Piping, plus Maya Scott (Focus Group member) for teaching yourself to read and shaving your head at three; Laurent Ruffo-Caracchini for making teenage brilliance likable; Tracey “Trace the Ace” Rapos for your ink; my niece and goddaughter, Dearbhaile Ní Dhubhghaill, for your passions for animals and Elvish; our Montreal family (Jeff, Declan, and Loïc Miles, and especially Hélène Roulston for MaxiMal calm); Holly Harkins-Manning and Richard, Owen, Silas, Duncan, Malcolm, Seamus Finnegan (Focus Group member), and Charlotte Manning, for making more look so much merrier; Alison Lee and Sarah Redekop, especially for brainstorming tree names for the Lotterys on the train to Menton; novelist Amanda Jennings for putting the name of her goddaughter Seren Johnson in this book as a fund-raiser for CLIC Sargent (the UK’s leading cancer charity for young people); Sidney and Madeleine Gervais, and thanks so much Kelly Gervais for driving me around Parkdale in search of Camelottery; Ali Dover for sanity-saving hilarity and dispatches from the wilder shores of parenting and woo, plus Zelda Dover for inimitable scowls; my sister-in-law Bernie Donoghue for endless patience; Ashlin Core (Focus Group member) for mismatched socks; Kate Ceberano for your daughter’s “imagic that”; Vivien Carrady and Sheldon, Desana, Seth, and Alex Rose for sudden headstands and grace under fire; the Bélanger-Ferrés (Danièle, Stéphane, Loup-Yann, Guillaume, and Tristan), as well as Samantha and Mallory Brennan and Jeff, Gavin, and Miles Fullerton, for showing how families can cherish everyone’s talents; Bipasha Baruah, Paul Perret, and Ahaan Perret Baruah for doing it your way; Eric Gansworth, Roberta Duhaime, and Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich for reading the manuscript and giving me the benefit of their kind advice; and Caroline Hadilaksono for the glorious illustrations.
A special thanks to my parents, Frances and Denis Donoghue (who’d have preferred to have two rather than eight, but love us all unflaggingly), and my beloved Chris, Una, and Finn Roulston (Focus Group member) for daily inspiration and laughs.
Text copyright © 2017 by Emma Donoghue
Illustrations copyright © 2017 by Caroline Hadilaksono
All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, the LANTERN LOGO, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Donoghue, Emma, 1969– author.
Title: The Lotterys plus one / Emma Donoghue.
Description: First edition. | New York : Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., 2017. | Summary: Once upon a time, two couples with Jamaican, Mohawk, Indian, and Scottish ethnic roots won the lottery and bought a big house where all of them, four adults and seven adopted and biological children, could live together in harmony—but change is inevitable, especially when a disagreeable grandfather comes to stay.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016008863 | ISBN 9780545925815 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Families—Ontario—Toronto—Juvenile fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Juvenile fiction. | Grandfathers—Juvenile fiction. | Toronto (Ont.)—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Family life—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Grandfathers—Fiction. | Toronto (Ont.)—Fiction. | Canada—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.D66 Lo 2017 | DDC 823.914 [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008863
First edition, April 2017
Cover art and lettering © 2017 by Caroline Hadilaksono
Cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi
e-ISBN 978-0-545-92582-2
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
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