Good Luck, Fatty

minutes before Duncan powers on the radio, which plinks out a perky, instrumental tune. I inhale another Milky Way and think of Tom, who has been incommunicado since that old broad clipped him, laying him up with a hairline fracture of the right tibia. Come to think of it, Buttercup’s got a bit of a hitch in his step lately too. Perhaps I should bump him up on my worry list.
    At last, Duncan pilots the van down a rutted dirt drive and jostles it to a stop kitty-corner to an ancient rust-and-earth-colored barn. But before we can make a dash for the entrance—a modern steel door cut haphazardly into the side of the barn and currently ajar—the sky opens up, dropping a steady ding of pea-sized hailstones on the van’s tinny roof and hood.
    Duncan and Marie don’t seem to notice the turn of bad weather. Or to care. They slip leisurely out of the van, and, with little choice in the matter, I traipse along behind them.
    “I didn’t hear anything about hail,” I comment once we’ve made it safely inside.
    I don’t know what I was expecting my parents’ barn to look like, but this definitely wasn’t it. I guess maybe I’d had two opposing visions dancing around in my mind: feral jungle hut or proper English tearoom (which goes to show how painfully limited my knowledge of Duncan and Marie really is). Because, as I look around, the scene that most readily comes to mind is an upscale city loft: sophisticated urban chic.
    Duncan drops his keys into a silver bowl that sits atop an island of what looks like glossy, reclaimed lumber, stained a deep, reddish mahogany. “What do you think?” he asks as I overtly stare.
    “Not bad,” I say with an impressed nod. The place is one big, open room with a rolling ladder (the kind libraries use for reaching overhead stacks) leading to an actual loft space, which I can’t see much of from the ground level. “Where’s my room?” I wonder.
    Marie chuckles, rubs gentle circles around the underside of her belly, the voluminous caftan she wears swishing and swaying across the creaky wooden floor. “The upstairs is partitioned,” she tells me. “A room for your father and me, and a spot for you and the baby.”
    “Oh.”
    Duncan peers into the fridge, his back hunched as he rearranges glass bottles of farm-sourced milk and freshly churned butter in tidy, wax-paper packets. If it weren’t for the Food Network, I’d be uneasy about the way Duncan and Marie live, their habits odd in comparison to the head-above-water ways to which Orv, Denise, and I are accustomed. Instead, I find my parents exotic.
    My mother motions at a bamboo stool with a crescent moon-shaped seat that reminds me of the grin Gramp would suppress—quivery and notched at the edges—whenever I said something inappropriate but funny.
    I take Marie’s cue and sit (a little too forcefully, I guess), splitting the seat with a drawn out craaack! The sound ping-pongs off the walls and hangs in the air like the ring of a church bell. I cover my mouth and mumble, “Sorry.”
    Duncan sets a cluster of grapes directly on the island and Marie begins nibbling them. “You know, Bobbi,” she says, the tone of a lecture creeping into her voice, “it wouldn’t hurt you to pursue a… healthier lifestyle.” She eyes the stool, which is now threatening to buckle under my weight; if a few more fibers give way, I’m a goner.
    Duncan follows the grapes with a big wooden bowlful of salad and a plate of cucumbers and hummus. “The way you eat over there,” he says, referring to Orv, Denise, and me, “it’s no wonder…”
    He shuts the refrigerator and I blink, realizing that these bunny offerings are what we’re meant to have for dinner. “Are you guys vegetarians?” I say.
    Duncan doles out the salad on colorful square plates like the ones I’ve spied in the Pottery Barn catalogs Denise leaves sprinkled about the house. (She peruses the advertisements for inspiration and then decorates on the cheap.) My plate is orange; Duncan’s is robin’s-egg blue; Marie gets the purple. I pick at the edge of a lettuce leaf as Marie says, “There are whole continents ravaged by hunger. The production of meat consumes too many resources.”
    “So you’re vegetarians?” I repeat.
    “It’s healthful and environmentally responsible,” Duncan tells me, finally claiming a stool of his own. “And it’s the only way we can feed all seven-billion people on the planet. Flesh isn’t a viable option.”
    I eat around a