There was dead silence in the room. It was the same silence that followed a terrible disaster, the same eerie stillness that motorists talked about after a multicar pileup on the interstate. It was the total absence of sound that occurred after every catastrophe, and it was even more of a catastrophe than Hannah had thought it would be.

A generous sprinkling of silvering in the center of her reflection could have spared her this moment. Spidery cracks splitting the glass into irregular shapes and turning her image into a Dali painting would have done the trick as well. Even better, the entire mirror could have fallen forward onto the floor, leaving nothing but an ornamental frame around the paper Delores had chosen for the walls of her eldest daughter’s boudoir.

“Good grief!” Hannah moaned, echoing Charlie Brown’s famous utterance. She’d known it would be bad, but not this bad. The screaming yellow accents on her black exercise outfit called blaring attention to the extra padding around her middle. Her legs, encased in black tights, looked like stout tree trunks, fully capable of supporting the oh-so-much larger torso than she’d realized she had. She’d chosen to wear black because it was slimming, but there was no escaping the truth. She was stout, like her Grandma Swensen. And although she’d loved her grandmother with every fiber of her being, she’d never aspired to actually look like her.

“At least no one will see me except a bunch of other women trying to lose weight,” Hannah told the cat, who was bristling slightly as he regarded her with round, unblinking eyes. “I know I don’t look good, but I wish you wouldn’t bristle that way.”

Moishe made no sound, but Hannah thought the hair on his back smoothed out a bit. It was time for a fish-flavored reward, and then she had to leave. She’d promised to meet Andrea at the Tri-County Mall to go over her exercise routine before class started. Hannah’s plan was to learn the exercises, attend the thirty-minute class, and then drive to The Cookie Jar to help her partner finish the baking for the day.

It took only a few moments to get ready to go. Hannah turned on the television for Moishe, made sure his food bowl was full to the brim, and checked to make sure he had plenty of water. Then she slipped into her longest jacket, one her grandmother would have called a car coat, grabbed her purse and her car keys, tossed several treats to the cat who was waiting patiently on the back of the couch, and hurried out the door.