We spent our evenings watching movies about spies and bank robbers. We put on big boots and walked around her parking lot. She took pleasure in the way I dressed, so I chose my outfits carefully: wide skirts with big blooming scarves, blouses edged with sequins or delicate stitching. “You’re your own person, Stella,” she said. “I like that.” The truth was, I shopped at stores that other people liked first or that trusted bloggers recommended. But it felt worthwhile to bring a smile to her face.

Though Lucy worked hard to keep the scraps of her life in order, it was getting harder. She took a lot of pills but didn’t know their names, only what they did: This one is for my heartbeat when it gets too fast, she said. There’s another one for when it’s skipping. I arranged them in small cubbyholes marked with the days of the week. I learned her body through the steaming bathwater: blood bruises darkening her thighs, sagging breasts draped like plastic bags over the bulb of her stomach. She had a long nose that was smooth and sweeping, its profile assertive. She wore frosty pink liner around the edges of her thin lips, but she couldn’t apply it right. The color always faded farther in, as if she’d sucked it all inside. She’d loved makeup for as long as I’d known her.

“Your mother’s always been a looker,” she told me once. “But she never seemed to notice.”

Lucy had always believed that if she could make her daughter different from her, different enough, she’d turn out satisfied. Now she was eighty years old and still asking herself: Had she?

Grandma Lucy had a body that looked sturdy and practical. It was hard to believe she’d been the source of my mother’s traits: a fierce and petite frame, a set of features that seemed stone-carved. Every part of my mother was thin, down to her fingers. She looked like she was about to split along a thousand secret fissures.

I looked more like Lucy than I looked like my mother. I had a certain beauty, but it wasn’t delicate. You didn’t want to protect me; you wanted to see if I would break. I was taller than most men by the time I got my period, over six feet, and my build was solid and demanding. My only fragile parts were my eyes—light blue and often teary, generally leaking. My father called them “windy.” My limbs looked heavy and felt that way, too: the straight stalks of my legs, my veiny palms and blunt fingers like weapons. “You’ve got a strong presence,” my mother said. “You should be proud of it.”

My mother dismissed beauty in the way that only beautiful women can. One time she told me, “Looks matter, I guess, but you can’t do much about them.” Then added, “And they never get you what you really want.”