Good Luck, Fatty

(yes, it’s that big) and hooks the entire contraption to some sort of pulley system he’s rigged. Like magic, my luggage floats up the ladder (well, maybe not magic exactly, since Duncan has to undertake quite a bit of cranking to set the illusion in motion) and sputters to a stop right before me. I heft the suitcase out and say, “Wow…impressive.”
    “Amazing what a little old-fashioned ingenuity can do, huh?” Duncan says as he cranks the basket back down to the first floor.
    Marie just beams from Roy to Duncan to me and back again, an unsettling look of fulfillment overtaking her expression. The last thing I want to do is give her the idea that I’m going to simply click into place, the missing piece of her wholesome family puzzle. I belong to Orv and Denise (and Gramp, even though he’s gone), the way I want Buttercup to belong to me.
    I check out the loft for the first time and discover that it’s not so terrible. Like Marie said, it’s divided pretty equally into two distinct spaces, separated by a series of oriental-looking screens (souvenirs my parents have collected during their travels, I suspect). The side with the crib and overgrown safari-themed mobile also features a simple futon I’d bet a million bucks was trucked in here from IKEA (another catalog retailer for which Denise harbors an affinity).
    I clunk my bag against the couch/bed (probably I’ll leave the thing in its upright position when I sleep anyway) and then slowly creep back down the ladder.
    “So tell us about this Yo-Yo race,” Marie prods coyly, my baby brother now clamped to her chest and suckling away.
    “Huh?” I say. It’s hard to concentrate when your mother’s boob is flopped out for everyone to see, even when everyone amounts to you, your father, and the offending bambino.
    “The race,” she repeats. “Don’t you volunteer over there at the bike shop?” She waves her hand through the air as if The Pit is just beyond the barn door instead of miles away in Industry.
    I meander to the kitchen island, where I’m happy to try my luck with another of my parents’ delicate stools if it means I don’t have to scrunch next to Marie and Duncan on the sofa. “I sorta work there,” I say, wondering exactly what my parents know about Harvey, The Pit, and my s extra-curricular activities. “Why?”
    “Your father’ll be competing,” my mother says, stopping to pat Duncan lovingly on the knee.
    It seems like just yesterday that I punched his name into the database. “I know.”
    My father reclines on the sofa (as much as one can recline on something with a solid wood frame, that is) crosses his legs and studies me pensively. “What about this Lex Arlington character?” he says. “Anything I should know about him?”
    Shuffling through a pile of old newspapers and new bills, I say, “Nothing you can’t find out in the National Enquirer. You do know who he is, right?”
    Marie shifts Roy to her shoulder but doesn’t bother covering up, her comfort with primitive exposure unnerving. I hope she doesn’t plan on acting like this in public. “He’s famous,” Marie says. “They call him the modern-day Marlon Brando. Quite the compliment, if you’re familiar with the original.”
    I’m not. “He’s on TV,” I add with a shrug. “He plays a lawyer called Kurt Holmes on Penal Code 911. ”
    Duncan’s eyes brighten. “We really should get a television set,” he tells Marie. “Think of all the educational programming Roy’s missing out on.”
    My parents engage in a brief squabble over the prospect of a TV invading their peaceful barn, most of their spat whizzing by me as I inspect a stack of drawings I’ve unearthed from their mountain of junk. On ragged slices of parchment that look as if they’ve been torn from an ancient sketchbook are illustrations of what I assume is Duncan’s pulley system at various stages of conceptualization, notes and equations chaotically scratched in the margins.
    I am intrigued enough to dig further, where I discover something entirely different: a cluster of sketches that seem to represent some sort of hybrid bicycle/hang glider that is not unlike the Ornithopter Leonardo da Vinci imagined more than four-hundred years ago.
    “What’s this?” I ask, the pages clutched in my hand.
    Duncan shoots off the sofa, wrenches the drawings from my grasp. “Honestly, Roberta!” he spouts, clearly aggrieved. “Mind your own beeswax!”
    Mind my own beeswax? If my father