Kendra hadn’t seen her own face in the bathroom mirror since her sister’s wedding three years ago. The mirror stayed covered with a Green Bay Packers schedule, corners curling from steam, Aaron Rodgers’s 2021 photo faded to a green blur. Behind it lived a woman who weighed 278 pounds and hadn’t worn anything with buttons in thirty months.
On a Tuesday in late October, the apartment on Milwaukee’s north side smelled of fried bologna and the vanilla plug-in Lois bought at Dollar Tree. Kendra dropped her keys next to a 90-minute bus transfer—$2.50, still warm from the ride down Wisconsin Avenue. She worked in a call center on the third floor; the elevator had mirrors on all three walls and she had not stepped inside it once in two years. She used the freight stairs.
Her doctor’s printout was folded into a square the size of a stamp, tucked in the coin pocket of her jeans. Dr. Osei had said, “Your A1C is 6.5. Your sleep apnea is moderate. Your knees crack like a roll of bubble wrap. Lose eighty-eight pounds before I see you in April, or we start metformin.” Kendra had asked if she could just try harder with diet. The doctor pushed the printout across the desk. “Trying is not a number.”
At home, Lois, sixty-six, sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of butter pecan ice cream. She didn’t look up from the coupon circular. “You’re not fat, baby. You’re solid. Solid women don’t get blown over by the wind.”
Kendra opened the refrigerator. Two liters of Mountain Dew on the top shelf. A whole cheesecake with one wedge missing. A styrofoam box of leftover ribs from the place on Fond du Lac Avenue. She closed the door without taking anything.
That night, she called a weight-loss clinic on the East Side and booked a free consultation for Thursday at 4:15. She wrote it on a yellow sticky note and pressed it to the refrigerator next to Jalen’s school lunch menu. The next afternoon, the note was gone. Lois said she’d wiped the fridge with a sponge. “Was it important?”
Kendra didn’t answer. She laced up a pair of old Asics and walked the parking structure at work before her shift—six stories, up and down, past the pay station where the overnight security guard ate sunflower seeds. She lost nine pounds in three weeks. She swapped her lunch from a double cheeseburger and fries to a grilled chicken wrap from the cafeteria, no cheese.
Lois responded by making a lasagna the size of a car battery on Sunday. When Kendra took one small square, Lois pressed her palm to her chest. “You don’t want my food anymore because you think I made you fat.” Kendra said, “I don’t think that. I think you’re scared I’ll change.” Lois didn’t say anything. She scraped the extra lasagna into a Tupperware and put it in the fridge, right where the sticky note had been.
Jalen came home from fifth grade with a letter from the school nurse. His BMI was in the 92nd percentile. Kendra found a bag of Skittles in his backpack, rolled inside a sock. She held the sock in her hand. “Grandma says I’m built like you,” Jalen said. He said it with his fists in his jacket pockets. Kendra put the Skittles on the table and said, “Then we both start walking.”
On Wednesday, the clinic left a voicemail. Kendra was standing at the kitchen counter, phone on speaker. Lois sat at the table with a pen, circling a coupon for frozen pizza.
“This is Lakeshore Weight Management,” the receptionist said. “Just confirming you wanted to cancel tomorrow’s consultation.”
Kendra stopped breathing. “I didn’t cancel anything.”
There was a pause. “A woman called this morning. She said she was your mother and that you’d decided you’re fine with your size.”
Kendra looked at Lois. Lois kept circling. The pen scratched against the coupon page. Kendra could hear the heater clunk in the hall, the neighbor’s dachshund yapping through the wall.
“So?” Lois said, without looking up. “You don’t need strangers telling you what you already know.”
Kendra picked up the phone. She didn’t hang up. “Ma’am, I’ll be there. Put me down for the $175 non-refundable deposit. I’m reading you the HSA card number.” She read the number from her phone screen, one digit group at a time. Lois’s pen stopped.
Then Kendra opened her bank app. She typed “storage” into the search bar. The recurring payment came up: $185 a month, every month, for eleven years—the unit on Capitol Drive where Lois kept her late husband’s tools, six boxes of old Avon bottles, and a Christmas village that hadn’t been unpacked since 2016. Kendra tapped “Cancel.” The confirmation chime filled the kitchen.
Lois stood so fast the chair tipped backward. “You can’t do that. Those are your father’s things.”
“Dad’s been gone since 2012,” Kendra said. “If they mattered that much, you would’ve opened them.” She walked to the bathroom, pulled the Packers schedule off the mirror, and looked at the woman behind it. The woman’s eyes were wet, but she didn’t turn away. “I need the hundred eighty-five for the clinic. You can pay for the unit yourself, or let them auction it.”
By April, Kendra had lost sixty-one pounds. She still had twenty-seven to go. Dr. Osei looked at the lab results and said, “I’m not writing the metformin yet. See me in July.” Kendra went home and took a picture of the number on the scale—217—and sent it to Jalen. He replied with a string of fire emojis. She made him put them away before Grandma saw.
Lois never paid the storage unit. The facility left three messages in March, then sent a certified letter: the contents would be auctioned on August 5. Lois borrowed eleven hundred dollars from her sister in Kenosha to save the Christmas village. She never mentioned it to Kendra. Kendra found out from the aunt at a fish fry, and didn’t say a word.
In August, Kendra weighed 190 pounds. She had lost eighty-eight. She stood in her bedroom and pulled three black contractor bags from under the bed. She filled them with size-24 jeans, tunics, bras with underwires that could hold up a clothesline. She loaded the bags into the trunk of her Kia Soul and drove to the St. Vincent de Paul drop-off on South 27th Street. The volunteer counted forty-seven items and handed her a donation receipt: estimated value, $2,340.
Kendra put the receipt in a white envelope and wrote Lois’s name on the front. That evening, she set the envelope on the kitchen table next to a bowl of grapes. Lois opened it, read the number, and folded the receipt in half.
“That’s what the big girl cost you,” Kendra said. “I gave her away.”
Lois set the envelope down. She didn’t speak. Kendra went to the bathroom, where the mirror was bare and bright. She looked at her reflection—190 pounds, same brown eyes, same chin—and turned off the light.
