I couldn’t get it over my hips.
I stood in my bedroom in my underwear with the dress bunched around my thighs like a deflated balloon. Midnight blue silk. A designer label I’d only ever seen in magazines. Tiny pearl buttons down the back.
Beautiful.
And four sizes too small.
I pulled. I tugged. I sucked in my stomach and held my breath until I saw spots.
It wouldn’t go past my hips. Not an inch.
I heard a ripping sound. Tiny. A seam starting to give.
I stopped.
I stood there in front of the full-length mirror with the silk caught around my hips, my face red, my stretch marks showing—silver and pink across my belly—and my daughter crying in her crib in the next room.
And I started to laugh.
Because if I didn’t laugh, I was going to cry. And I’d done enough crying in front of that mirror in the last five months.
My name is Jenna Ward. I’m thirty-two years old.
I’d had a baby five months earlier. A daughter. Hazel. Seven pounds, nine ounces. Dark hair. A grip like a little vise. She came three weeks early after nineteen hours of labor and an emergency C-section, and she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
I gained forty-one pounds while I was pregnant with her.
I’d lost eleven.
I peeled the dress off very slowly so I wouldn’t rip it. I laid it on the bed.
I looked at the tag.
Size 2.
I wear a 10. Sometimes a 12 now, since Hazel.
My mother-in-law knows my size. She’s known it for six years. She asks every Christmas so she can buy me sweaters I’ll never wear.
I sat down on the edge of the bed next to the dress.
In the nursery, Hazel was still crying. I got up and went to her. I picked her up out of her crib. She was red-faced and furious, the way only a five-month-old can be furious. I sat down in the rocking chair by the window and fed her.
She calmed down. Her little hand curled around my finger.
I looked down at her.
“Your grandmother,” I whispered, “is a piece of work.”
Hazel burped.
When Hazel was asleep again, I called Clara.
She answered on the second ring.
“Jenna, darling. Did the dress arrive?”
“It did,” I said. “Clara, I think there’s been some mistake. It’s a size two.”
“Yes?”
“I wear a ten. You know that.”
There was a pause.
Then she laughed. A light, tinkling laugh. Like ice in a glass.
“No, no, no,” she said. “There’s no mistake, sweetheart. That dress is exactly for you.”
“It doesn’t fit.”
“Not yet,” Clara said. “But there are still two weeks before my party. So it’s time for you to finally lose some weight!”
My jaw nearly dropped.
“Clara,” I said slowly. “I had a baby five months ago.”
“I know, darling. I was there. I remember.” Another little laugh. “But five months is plenty of time. I was back in my jeans six weeks after Ryan was born.”
“I had a C-section.”
“Well, that’s no excuse.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. My hand was shaking around the phone.
“Two weeks,” I said finally. “There’s no way I can lose enough weight in two weeks to fit into a size two. That’s not possible. That’s not healthy.”
“Well,” Clara said brightly, “now you’ll finally have some motivation, won’t you? Maybe it’s time to stop eating so much?”
She hung up.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time.
I looked at the dress. Midnight blue silk. Pearl buttons. Beautiful.
I looked at myself in the mirror.
Then I looked away.
Clara Ward is sixty-four years old.
She’s five foot six and weighs maybe a hundred and ten pounds. She has silver-blonde hair she gets done every Thursday at a salon in Highland Park that charges three hundred dollars for a cut. She wears a size two. She’s worn a size two her whole life. She tells everybody.
She’s been married to Philip Ward for forty years. Philip owns a commercial construction company in Dallas: Ward Building Group. They have a big house in University Park with columns out front and a fountain in the driveway and a pool nobody swims in.
They throw parties for everything. Birthdays. Anniversaries. The Fourth of July. The Kentucky Derby. Christmas. New Year’s. The first day of spring.
Big parties. Fancy ones. With caterers and valet parking and string quartets and ice sculptures.
They’re wealthy—or so I’ve always believed. So for them, this is completely normal.
I met their son, Ryan, eight years ago at a friend’s wedding in Austin.
I was a bridesmaid in a terrible peach dress. He was a groomsman in a rented tux. We got stuck at the same table during dinner because neither of us had a date. He spilled red wine on my peach dress during the toast. He was mortified. He spent the next twenty minutes in the bathroom with me trying to get the stain out with club soda and a napkin.
It didn’t come out.
We laughed so hard we cried.
We danced every slow song that night. We got married two years later.
Clara never liked me.
Not from the first day.
The first time I met her, at a Sunday brunch at the University Park house, she looked me up and down in the front hallway. My sundress. My sandals. My hair. My hips.
“Oh,” she said. “You’re… healthy.”
She said it with a smile.
I thought maybe she meant it nicely.
She didn’t.
I was never good enough for her son.
I grew up in a little town called Mineola, in East Texas. My dad drove a feed truck. My mom worked at the Dollar General. I went to Texas A&M on scholarships and student loans. I’m a speech therapist. I work with kids who stutter and kids who can’t say their Rs and kids with autism who are learning to talk for the first time.
I love it.
Clara calls it “your little job.”
I didn’t cook right, according to Clara. I made too many casseroles. Too much Tex-Mex.
“Ryan grew up on French cuisine, Jenna. Real cooking.”
I didn’t clean right.
“Is that dust on your bookshelf? Do you even own a duster?”
I didn’t dress right.
“Is that from Target? How… practical.”
And, as Clara loved to say at every family dinner, every holiday, every birthday:
“My son has always deserved a better woman.”
She said it in front of Ryan. In front of Philip. In front of Ryan’s sister, Brooke. In front of the caterers.
She said it at our wedding.
At the reception. During her toast. Holding a glass of champagne.
“Ryan has always been the light of my life,” she said into the microphone. “He’s handsome. He’s brilliant. He’s kind. He could have married anyone.”
She looked at me. She smiled.
“And he chose Jenna.”
Everybody laughed. They thought it was a joke.
It wasn’t.
But it got worse after I got pregnant.
Much worse.
At first, she was thrilled. Her first grandchild. She cried when we told her. She hugged Ryan for five minutes. She hugged me for about three seconds.
Then I started to show.
“Oh my,” she said at Thanksgiving. I was a few months along. “You’re getting big, aren’t you? Are you sure there’s only one in there?”
“Eating for two doesn’t mean eating for five, Jenna,” she said at Christmas, watching me take a second helping of mashed potatoes.
“Have you thought about a personal trainer?” she said at Easter. I was eight months pregnant. I could barely walk. “For after the baby. You’ll want to get your figure back fast. Men lose interest, you know.”
Ryan always said the same thing.
“Ignore her, babe. She doesn’t mean it. That’s just how she is.”
After Hazel was born, Clara came to the hospital.
She held Hazel for exactly four minutes. She took eleven photos for Instagram. She looked at me lying in the hospital bed, swollen and exhausted, recovering from surgery, with my hair matted with sweat.
“Well,” she said. “Now the hard work starts. Getting your body back.”
I’d been a mother for eighteen hours.
The comments never stopped.
“When was the last time you looked at yourself in the mirror?” she said in June, when Hazel was six weeks old. “God, you can’t even fit into any normal clothes anymore!”
“My son needs an attractive woman,” she said in July, standing in my kitchen while I washed bottles. “Not someone like you.”
“Have you tried just eating less?” she said in August. “It’s really not complicated, darling. Calories in, calories out.”
I tried to ignore it.
I tried so hard.
I told myself she was old-fashioned. I told myself she came from a different generation. I told myself she didn’t know any better.
I told myself to keep the peace. For Ryan. For Hazel. For the family.
But at night, after Hazel was asleep, I’d stand in front of the bathroom mirror and look at my stomach. At the silver stretch marks. At the pouch of skin that wouldn’t go away. At the C-section scar, still pink.
And I’d hear her voice.
Not someone like you.
Ryan supported me.
I want to be fair about that. He did. In every possible way.
Except one.
He got up with Hazel in the night so I could sleep. He did the laundry. He cooked dinner. He held me when I cried in the shower for no reason I could explain, as I sometimes did in those first few months after having a baby.
He told me I was beautiful. Every single day.
“You grew a human being, Jen,” he said. “You went through surgery. You’re feeding her with your body. You’re the most incredible person I’ve ever met.”
He meant it. I knew he meant it.
But when his mother said something cruel, he never said a word to her.
Not once.
“I don’t want to start a fight,” he’d say afterward. “You know how she gets. It’s not worth it.”
It’s not worth it.
I wondered, sometimes, if he meant the fight wasn’t worth it.
Or I wasn’t.
The party was for Clara and Philip’s fortieth wedding anniversary.
They’d rented the whole restaurant. Le Château. A French place outside the city, out past Frisco, in the middle of a vineyard. Stone walls and candlelight and crystal chandeliers. It costs four hundred dollars a person just to walk in the door.
They invited a hundred and fifty people.
There was a strict dress code, printed on the invitation in silver script.
Ladies: Formal gowns in black or midnight blue only.
Gentlemen: Black tie.
Clara’s colors. Black and blue. To match the theme.
Forty Years Under the Stars.
I’d been shopping for a dress for a week. I’d gone to three stores. Nothing fit right. Everything I tried on made me feel like a stuffed sausage.
Then Clara called.
“Honey, I already ordered a dress for you. Don’t worry. It’ll be delivered soon.”
I was very surprised. Clara had never bought me anything that wasn’t a passive-aggressive sweater.
For one second, I thought maybe she was trying. Maybe Hazel had softened her. Maybe this was an olive branch.
Then the dress arrived.
Size two.
There are still two weeks before my party. So it’s time for you to finally lose some weight.
That night, I showed Ryan the dress.
He held it up. He looked at the tag. He looked at me.
“Size two?” he said. “Babe, you were never a size two. Not even in college.”
“I know.”
“Why would she…”
He stopped. He saw my face.
“She did it on purpose,” I said. “She told me. She said I have two weeks to lose weight. She said maybe it’s time to stop eating so much.”
Ryan’s jaw tightened.
For a second, I thought he was going to pick up the phone. I thought he was going to call her. Finally. Finally say something.
He didn’t.
He put the dress down.
“Don’t pay attention to her,” he said. “Seriously. Just ignore it. We’ll go buy you a dress that fits. I don’t want to argue with her right before the party. It’s their fortieth. Dad’s been planning it for a year.”
“Ryan—”
“Please, Jen,” he said. “Just this once. Let it go. For Dad.”
I looked at him for a long time.
“Okay,” I said.
We went to Nordstrom the next Saturday. Ryan held Hazel in the carrier on his chest while I tried on dresses.
I found one. Midnight blue. Size twelve. Simple. A wrap dress with three-quarter sleeves and a skirt that flared a little at the knees. Soft fabric. Forgiving. It hid my stomach. It made my waist look like a waist.
I came out of the dressing room. Ryan was standing outside with Hazel asleep against his chest.
He looked at me.
“Wow,” he said quietly.
“Is it okay?”
“Jen,” he said. “You look beautiful.”
I looked in the three-way mirror. For the first time in five months, I didn’t hate what I saw.
The dress was two hundred and twenty dollars. On sale.
I bought it.
I put Clara’s size-two dress back in the box it came in.
I didn’t return it. I couldn’t. There was no receipt. No return label. Just a packing slip.
I glanced at the packing slip before I put the lid on.
Maison Lune Boutique — Highland Park, TX.
Order #48821.
1 — Evening Gown, Midnight Silk, Size 2 — $1,840.00.
Billed to: J. Ward.
Shipped to: 4412 Lakewood Blvd., Dallas, TX.
My address.
Billed to: J. Ward.
I stopped.
I looked at it again.
J. Ward.
Clara’s name is Clara. Philip’s name is Philip.
I’m the only J. Ward.
I didn’t think much of it at the time. I thought maybe it was a mistake. A billing name field filled in wrong.
I put the packing slip in the box. I put the box on the top shelf of my closet.
I forgot about it.
For eleven days.
