Good Luck, Fatty

nose and a mouth, my features amount to the quadratic equation. “Come again?” she says.
    A bunch of legs and feet surround me, accompanied by a number of hushed but urgent voices. The word concussion is bandied about.
    “Buttercup the cat,” I repeat, feeling suddenly sleepy. “Is he here? Can you look?”
    But no one has to, because just as I start going out, I feel the furball’s cool, wet nose, followed by his extraordinarily ticklish whiskers, grazing my elbow.
    Then I’m toast.

 
     
    chapter 19
     
    I CAN’T have been out more than twenty or thirty seconds, because the same forest of unfamiliar legs is encircling me as I bloom back to alertness. “My neck hurts,” I tell no one in particular as I reach around to rub it. “Do you have any water?” (A small, lucid part of my brain recognizes these remarks as non sequiturs, but my fuzzy grey matter just shrugs.)
    “We’ve got someone coming,” a thin gentleman in polyester slacks informs me, “to take you to the medical tent for a checkup. You cracked your head pretty good there.”
    “I did?”
    The man squats down, exposing his argyle socks and hairless, cinnamon-colored shins. “Yes, siree,” he says, running a hand over my helmet, which I can somehow tell is in about the same shape as Humpty Dumpty, post-fall.
    I rest my eyes for a while, despite the fact that people keep talking to me (probably so I don’t die).
    Then I hear something peculiar.
    “Orv?” I say in a tone that, even to me, sounds dreamy. I’m sure I recognize the distinctive clomp of his work boots, with their leaden toes and stiff rubber bottoms.
    And I’m right. “Jesus, Bobbi,” he says, hunched over me with one of those makeshift stretchers doctors use in combat zones.
    Speaking of combat zones…
    “Let me take a look,” says my mother, pressing Orv to the side. She shines a tiny flashlight in my eyes, orders me to touch one index finger to the tip of my nose, then the other. “Do you have any pain?” she inquires coolly.
    Shouldn’t she be crying? I think. Maybe even hysterically? I mean, her daughter just cheated death here.
    “Uh-uh,” I say. I try to sit up, and she lets me.
    “What about your feet?” she asks.
    “What about ‘em?”
    “Can you wiggle your toes?”
    I do.
    “Good.” She helps me stand. “Put some weight on those legs,” she says, steadying me as I take a tentative step.
    “Seems fine,” I report with a pop of my shoulders, my head achy and my heart sore over this little tumble costing me the race.
    “We won’t be needing that,” Marie tells Orv about the stretcher. “She’ll walk back with us.”
    “Ready?” Orv asks, clasping an arm around my shoulder. With the stretcher clunking along behind him like a ball and chain, the three of us part the crowd.
    And Buttercup follows.
     

----
     
    Duncan took the Yo-Yo by three-eighths of a mile, eclipsing even Lex Arlington’s star (and making off with the twenty-five-hundred dollars in prize money, which, had Lex won, would have reverted to charity).
    “I’m sorry,” I tell Orv and Denise from the back of our new (to us anyway) car, the one I’m now short on dough to help pay for. “Maybe Harvey can start paying me for everything I do around The Pit. I mean, the place is pretty much famous now.”
    I give Buttercup, who’s cooperatively perched on my lap, a gentle noogie, my mashed bicycle helmet shifting out from under my foot as the car hits a pothole.
    “I told you,” Denise scolds, “we aren’t taking your money. Too bad you didn’t win something, though,” she adds with a sigh. “That would’ve been nice.”
    “Maybe next time,” I say.
    Buttercup sinks his claws into my thigh, and even though it hurts, I don’t stop him. Sometimes, I figure, love is worth the pain.
    “You had a good shot,” Orv belatedly tells me, “but you might want to sit out next year. Cycling ain’t necessarily your thing.”
    I want to argue with him, but instead I say, “Yeah, you’re probably right.” The car goes silent for a bit, and then I ask, “Hey, Denise, how you been feelin’?” Because I’ve noticed that the pregnancy updates have been scanty and sporadic of late.
    She peers over her shoulder at me. And the cat. “Better,” she says with a smile and a soft pat of her belly, “now that the morning sickness is gone.”
    I wouldn’t have even known she was ill except for the extra trips to the bathroom she’s been taking at bedtime (morning for her,