Summary

Lola, the teenaged narrator, begins the story with a memory of the moment everything in her life changed. She is 12, sitting on her bed absorbed in the book Watership Down, wanting nothing more than to keep reading, when her mother sternly demands her presence in the bathroom. Lola shares that for as much as she dreads one-on-one moments with her mother like this one, she cannot deny the resemblance they share in certain defining features. Like the towering, statuesque Mami, Lola is already tall, with her mother’s dark skin and big eyes.

Lola describes her mother’s breasts in detail as one of the features Mami is most proud of, along with her face and hair. Lola adds that Mami’s physical allure was unable to keep her husband, Lola’s father, from abandoning them after three years of marriage. While Mami...