“I have never been unfaithful to your father,” my mother said. She drummed her nails against the counter once, and then took her coffee upstairs, to drink in bed. I didn’t realize until much later that she hadn’t exactly answered my question.

She didn’t get out of bed for three days.

When she finally emerged from her room, she had changed. She was diminished no longer—in fact, the combination of the party and the days in bed seemed to have made her even taller, if such a thing were possible. She no longer looked as though it was possible for her to cry. She no longer looked as though it was possible for her to be hurt, or to be sad, or to be silent. She marched out of her room and went straight to the garage.

In the days and weeks and months that followed, she became utterly obsessed with the Fatties. She had always worked on them in her spare time, but now she spent hours with them, hidden away, the radio she kept in the garage turned to full blast. She would come home from the advertising firm, where she did nothing, she once said, but staple things together, tear things apart, and change the size of words, and then go straight to the Fatties without even entering the house. She stopped making dinner; I lived on pasta and toast. I think she stopped eating, but even this did not diminish her. She would get up early in the morning to be with the Fatties before work, and she would stay with them long into the night, even as the air became edged with cold. The Fatties doubled in number and then grew into a horde, crowding the garage. When I looked inside, I saw heavy clay body parts on every surface, a fat face at every window. Eventually, the finished Fatties began to spill out into our backyard, first congregating around the garage doors and then spreading out over the grass, a Middle American Medusa’s garden. Even then she couldn’t stop. She kept building. She kept smoothing back the clay skin, forming the clay hands to fit her own, looking deeply into the hollow, carved eyes.

What was she looking for? What form would satisfy her? Or was it just that she was trying to fill the space my father had left with creature after creature who might finally accept her love?

Maybe the latter, because the only hours she spent away from the Fatties were spent with men. I almost never saw them, the men who stopped in the kitchen for a drink before following her upstairs, the men who dropped her off in the middle of the night, the men who called, or who didn’t call. All different men, all with the same face.