Page 79 of Catch a Kiwi
MY FAVORITE DAY
Summer
The redheaded woman set her kids down and said, “Hi. I’m Poppy, and I’m guessing you’re Summer.”
“You guess correctly,” I said, trying not to feel out of place. “This is my cousin, Delilah.”
“Matiu told me about you,” she said. “My husband. Oh, and these are Isobel and Kai, my two youngest. The one Roman was chasing is Olivia. Somebody’s always chasing Olivia. I’m glad you came with Roman. It’s heaps, meeting all these people, even if they’re your relations. Here’s a clue. The one who matters is Koro.”
“You’re not Maori, though, are you?” Delilah asked. She had her phone out and was holding it like shewasplanning on taking notes.
“You can’t always tell by looking,” Poppy said, “but you’re right, I’m not. I’m a bit of a cousin to Roman all the same, at least by Maori standards. My brother’s married to Hemi’s sister-in-law Karen, and I’m married to Hemi’s cousin Matiu, so you see …”
“And that’s a cousin?” Delilah asked.
“I told you,” Poppy said, “Maori standards. That’s a cousin twice over. Here come Matiu and Roman. Time for introductions, I think.”
“Right,” I said. “We’ll hang back.”
“Oh,” Poppy said, “you won’t be allowed to do that. Come on.”
“Because I have to sing Koro the song,” the little girl said. “We’re all going to sing the song.”
“Yes,” Poppy said, “you are. Because it’s a special day.”
That was how I ended up threading my way through the crowd, holding Roman’s hand, with Delilah following us and typing on her phone. I hissed, “Stop doing the notes thing,” and she said, “How am I supposed to remember names otherwise? Or what people say about other people? So far, I’ve got that everybody loves Koro, everybody wishes Daniel would take a hike, and Hemi’s weirdly scary. Not exactly news, but the day is young.”
At that moment, the crowd opened up, and I saw a very old man sitting in a wooden chair painted like a peacock’s feathers, smack in the middle of the patio, one hand on the rounded handle of a wooden stick. It was hard to say which was more gnarled, the hands or the stick, and he looked small in his clothes, as if he’d lost weight recently, but his brown eyes were bright in his wrinkled face.
“Koro!” It was the older girl, Olivia, still holding the banner. “We are going to sing you our special song now. I made it up myself.”
“Go on, then,” the old man said in his scratchy voice. “I’ve been waiting a hundred years to hear my special song.”
“But we need you, Hamish,” the girl said. “We have toallsing the song, because it is a family song.”
An older boy, still a redhead but with a more serious face, stood up from where he’d been sitting at the old man’s feet, petting the duck. “OK,” he said, taking the other side of thebanner from Olivia and stepping carefully along the patio until the banner was stretched out, then adjusting his grip so it was level. “Come on, Kai,” he said. “Come hold my side with me.” Kai, apparently, was the baby, because he toddled forward and, rather than holding the banner, reached for the other boy’s hand. On the other side of the banner, the younger girl grabbed for a corner, but Olivia yanked it away and said, “No. Holding it is for grown-up kids who are in school.”
“Nah,” the old man said. “Holding it is for all of you.”
Olivia sighed, but she grudgingly allowed her sister to clutch the lower corner of the banner and said, “This is our song,” and started bellowing it out at the top of her lungs, the other kids joining in raggedly, the younger girl a couple of words behind.
There wasn’t so much of a tune to it as the suggestion of a tune. These were the words.
Koro is one hundred, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay.
Koro is one hundred, just for today.
He’s very old and wrinkly, but he has lollies. Oh yay!
Run and run before he’s dead,
Run and get lollies.
Yay yay yay yay yay.
Matiu had a hand over his handsome face and was laughing. Poppy was saying, “The ‘dead’ part is new to me, I swear,” but she was laughing, too, and so was everybody else. As for the old man, his face was split by a grin in which a few teeth were missing, and he said, “Everybody sing now. Tane, take the lead.”
“Matiu’s older brother,” Poppy said in my ear. “Lives next door.”
