5. When a tornado happens at their grandparents’ house, day still turns to night and the leaves still get upside down and the cars still disappear, but they also get to hide in the hall closet, which is full of their dad’s old games from when he was their age.
When a tornado happens at their grandparents’ house, day still turns to night and the leaves still get upside down and the cars still disappear, but they also get to hide in the hall closet, which is full of their dad’s old games from when he was their age. It is hard to imagine their dad being their age because their dad is gigantic, more than six feet tall, and he has a bunch of gray hair, which their grandparents make all kinds of jokes about when their mom’s not there and everyone laughs because they say it must have been because of her his hair went gray. Amy and Zoe are not supposed to tell their mom about these jokes, and they don’t.
When they’re at their grandparents’, Amy lets them keep the light on even though Zoe is too little for a lot of the games. They play with the dominoes, but Zoe misses the point and knocks them down before it’s time to. They play with the marbles, but there’s not that much you can do with marbles on a small square of scraggly carpet. If you roll them around they’ll just get lost.
Zoe always wants to play Operation, which is where you have to remove the diseases out of Cavity Sam with a pair of tweezers. You have to be really careful because if the tweezers hit the sides of Sam’s cavities where his ailments are, his nose lights up, and he buzzes and you lose the game. But Zoe loves the lit-up nose and laughs and laughs, missing the point, asking Amy for permission to mess up one more time.
Their grandparents call it getting sprung when they’re let back out of the hall closet, and the reward for getting sprung is pop and cookies. Amy and Zoe are not allowed to drink pop at their house so at their grandparents’ they drink all of it they can, and then they jump and jump on the enormous bed upstairs until they’re ready for their grandmother to read to them, and then they collapse into all the great big mismatched pillows and spread out like they’re making snow angels and follow along in their heads because they always choose the same stories, and they know them all by heart but still get scared when their grandma does her witch’s voice. Then they straighten up, hands at their hips under the covers, and Zoe scooches over to her sister’s side.