Good Luck, Fatty

spike of sadness through my soul. “Dad,” I say, with a raised voice that interrupts Harvey and Duncan.
    Both men turn in my direction, Harvey rocking on his heels, his hands clasped behind his back, Duncan’s ears pricked like a curious dog’s. “Yes?” says my father.
    “Can I help you?” I ask.
    Harvey shoots me a cautionary glance. “I was just telling your father that the heats were divided by age based on date of entry, not date of competition.”
    Who cares? I want to say. Instead, I whisper, “Oh.”
    “We can’t change them now,” Harvey continues in a regretful tone that strikes me as false, “simply because entrants have had birthdays between registration and race day. Even if we could, there’s no time.”
    Leave it to Duncan to devise a list of inane demands. “You want to race the old folks?” I ask incredulously.
    “Forty-five is hardly old,” Duncan insists with a huff. “Do you think it’s fair to pit me against thirty-year-olds?”
    My eyes go wide. “It’s for charity!” I remind him with a dash too much force. “What does it matter?”
    “The asthma fund will have their money,” Duncan says.
    “Lung,” says Harvey. “The American Lung Association.”
    “Regardless,” Duncan says, “I don’t undertake a challenge to lose.”
    Except parenting, I stop myself from uttering. Your record in that arena is pretty spotty. “We don’t have time,” I say, echoing Harvey. In reality, I could probably switch riders around with a few strokes at the keyboard, but I’m not about to let that intelligence loose. “Anything else?” I ask, my gaze jumping from Duncan to Marie.
    Duncan pulls his lips into a horizontal line, turns on his heel for the door.
    “We’ll expect you tomorrow,” my mother tells me flatly. The bell dings as Duncan stomps out. “Try to be on time.”
     

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    Denise’s doctor was wrong about her chances of conceiving, it seems (unless Orv just has supercharged sperm), because as Denise and Orv ecstatically reported after dinner last night, I will soon have a new baby second-cousin.
    “What about over there?” I ask Orv as he pilots Duncan’s minivan (shockingly my father let Orv and Denise borrow the thing for the day) through the rutted dirt parking lot of the Second Chance Flea Market, a shabby little venture by the highway that specializes in Chinese knockoffs of designer shoes and handbags, not to mention its fair share of dusty merchandise from the attics and crawlspaces of hard-up residents nearby. I point at a Mercedes (a Mercedes? really?), whose driver is executing a three-point turn, freeing up a spot. “They’re leaving.”
    Orv takes my advice and sneaks the van in behind the Mercedes, nabbing the spot before an elderly man in a Cadillac has the chance to round the corner and challenge him. “Hang on,” he says to Denise, who’s already unbuckled her safety belt. He shuts the van down, hops out and rushes to her door.
    I yank the slider open and meet them by the van’s front bumper.
    Denise is pregnant, I remind myself. It’s not showing yet, but she is. And if the weekly injections her doctor has prescribed are successful, she’ll be able to carry the baby to term. Still, it’s a high risk pregnancy and anything could—and may—go wrong (at least according to Orv and Denise, who, when they told me this, might as well have added, “Don’t get your hopes up until you see the whites of the baby’s eyes”).
    I’m pretty optimistic anyhow, though, because Orv and Denise deserve to be happy more than anyone I know. And, once in a while, the universe seems to take this into consideration.
    We trudge along in a ragged little line, Orv in the lead, me bringing up the rear, Denise floating between us like an air bubble suspended in a jug of molasses.
    “Last time we were here…” Denise says, sprouting up on her tiptoes for a better view, “…there was a shop that sold discounted baby goods.”
    Calling any of these displays, the most polished of which amounts to little more than five or six weathered picnic tables strung together and covered with a tarp, a “shop” is overly generous. “Mind if I wander?” I say. I’ve got twelve dollars and a surprisingly specific shopping list.
    Orv wraps an arm around Denise’s shoulder and tells me, “Meet us at the hot dog cart in half an hour.”
    I shrug. “Is there a clock around here somewhere?” Maybe I should also seek out a watch.
    Denise unlatches the