Good Luck, Fatty

with a thud. The BMX boomerangs into my path.
    I drop the Schwinn to the ground and chug around the car, which has halted in the middle of the road. When I reach Tom’s side, he’s already struggling to his knees. “Are you okay?” I squeak. I suck in a breath, offer him my arm as a crutch. With a string of groans, he makes a creaky ascent to his feet.
    In my peripheral vision, I notice the tiny, narrow frame of a person coming our way. “Oh, dear,” a woman’s shaky, wet voice says.
    I move my eyes from Tom’s ripped jeans to the woman’s pruned, perplexed face. “Don’t you look where you’re going?!” I cry. “You almost killed him!” (Well, maybe not, but it felt good to say.)
    Tom runs a palm over his chest, as if he’s verifying his heartbeat. “I’m all right,” he murmurs, his words weak and slow.
    In a dreamy tone, the woman says, “Do we need an ambulance?”
    “Where’s my bike?” asks Tom.
    “Can you walk?” I say. He takes a few cautious steps. “What about your lungs?” I continue. “Are you breathing okay?”
    He puffs his lungs full of air, winces a little. “I don’t know,” he admits with a stunted shrug.
    “Should I call an ambulance?” the woman repeats.
    A young dude on a Harley roars up, stops and squints at us. “Y’all set?” He stares down the BMX, which I now realize has a blown tire.
    Tom hobbles in the direction of the bikes, and I follow. “Fine, I guess,” I answer for him.
    “You sure?” the guy says.
    Again, the woman: “I’ll get the phone.”
    “Forget it,” I snap. “His parents own the place. They know where you live.”
     

 
     
    chapter 4
     
    AVOCADO GREEN. That’s the color of the phone thrumming its throaty ring against our sunny yellow kitchen wall. It’s a sound that reminds me of Buttercup’s measured purring: comforting in its predictability. It also makes Orv, Denise, and me special, since we’re probably the only folks left in America without cellular phones.
    “Hello?” I say, the word coming out in a gasp.
    “Roberta?” It’s Marie. She doesn’t recognize my voice.
    I consider pretending to be Denise. “Speaking.”
    “Oh, good,” she says, all syrupy. “I’m glad I caught you.” I don’t respond. “Your father and I would like you to come over for dinner.”
    The phone cord, which was once twelve feet of tight coils, is now slack, undone, as limp as a morning glory in the midday sun. I trail it along behind me as I scuff into the living room, a library copy of Into Thin Air tucked under my arm. “What for?”
    “To eat,” she says. (I wish she was being sarcastic, but I don’t think she knows how.) “And to talk.”
    I plop down on the scratchy plaid couch. “About?”
    “Pardon me?”
    “About?” I repeat louder.
    She hesitates. “Well, about…” I imagine her blinking her wide chocolate eyes, trying to come up with a phrasing that doesn’t put us at odds. “Don’t you want to be part of this?”
    By “this” I assume she means the baby, Roy. “It’s not really my business,” I say diplomatically. The response that pops into my mind is much meaner.
    She clucks with incredulity. “But…of course it’s your business,” she says, as if she’s talking herself into the idea. “We’re a family.”
    The woman can’t possibly be buying what she’s selling. Donating an egg and hanging around just long enough to make sure the little critter you’ve spawned doesn’t gnaw its own leg off hardly makes one a parent. “I like it here,” I say, pinching a few strands of shag carpeting between my toes.
    Marie’s voice shoots up a couple of octaves. “It’s settled then,” she says. “You’ll stay in Industry during the week and Hollyhock on the weekends.”
    I snort. “I don’t think so. Harvey needs me to—”
    “Don’t get fresh, Roberta Josephine,” my mother interrupts. “If we have to, your father and I can—”
    “What? What can you and Duncan do?”
    A long pause thickens the air. When Marie’s voice comes back, it’s a whisper. “We’ve missed you, Bobbi,” she says. “Won’t you come share a meal with your father and me?”
    The part of me that loves my parents tussles with the part of me that’s been stung by them. “Okay,” I force myself to say. Because even though I may regret granting it to them, my heart tells me that Duncan and Marie deserve one last chance.
     

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    As I sit cross-legged on the bristly grass at the edge of our driveway,