He hadn’t expected that his child would be a fat girl. Perhaps he had unconsciously been assuming that the child would look like the boy on the diaper box at his mother’s house—the one she used to store washcloths.

Nor had he expected that this fat girl would be popular. She made friends easily at school, friends both fat and thin, both boys and girls, fitting in easily as a pliable peg in a flexible hole, happily enmeshed and always full of enthusiastic stories of the schoolday, the week.

He hadn’t expected to have a daughter who was good at squash, and at shot-put. He never expected that he would be at a District Sports Carnival watching his daughter take out the silver medal in shot-put, and taking bronze in discus. He had never expected to see a daughter of his grinning plumply in a photograph, with a ribbon around her neck, entirely unconscious of her fatness.

He did not expect, when she turned sixteen, that his daughter would sit with him at a calm kitchen table, telling him of her plans for university: law or social work or both, and her plans to do whatever good she could do in the world.

He had not expected to have a fairly fat seventeen year old daughter in the top three of her class in every subject, with her charity commitments every fortnight, and with the friendly, slightly overweight boyfriend coming around for dinners on Friday, always cheerful and respectable.

He was never quite sure whether he or his wife could claim any of the credit for how well Lucille had turned out, and how well-adjusted she seemed. He himself had always been a thin man. He didn’t even like cake.