It takes a special breed of obese and slovenly humans to produce a woman with a closet full of form-fitting muumuus, but the Fullers had always been exceptional. Every matriarch in the family line, from the first Fuller cow to beach herself on Plymouth Rock to our heroine, straddled the fat, greasy line between chronic obesity and anomalistic. The Fuller men certainly had their share of portly progenitors—the law of large numbers combined with the durability of frame required to mate with a Fuller woman saw to that. But the men had to be in at least passable physical fitness—to feed and dress and bathe and mate with and fetch meals for the women—and it was the women that stole the show.

Tawnee, our heroine (everyone’s, really, for she saved us all), was a testament to the race, the climax of nearly four hundred years of American Fuller women. Her thighs looked like thunderclouds. The skin of her armpits was so tender from stretching and a constant marinade of sweat that if she waved to a friend (which she didn’t, because she had none), pink friction sores erupted as the salty weight of her upper arms ripped at the skin of her torso. Her poor, neglected loins (she hadn’t seen them in years) were protected by three shield-folds of stomach and thigh fat, a construction that looked like a smaller person’s ass when she wore sweatpants, creating the impression that some good Samaritan had been swallowed head-first years earlier in a valiant attempt to provide the last moment of sexual pleasure she would ever feel.

Oh, Tawnee, you were so young once. Your golden locks, now thinning and straw-like, once dangled at the edges of a human-sized face. Your Coke bottle body gave way to a jug of bleach. You used to be nimble and lithe, now your body can’t be moved without the effort of three strong orderlies. These same orderlies, in another time, ages ago it seems, would have crawled on their hands and knees to win your favor. Now they wash you with extendable Shiwallas like a Mack truck. Oh Tawnee, where did you go? Are you still in there somewhere, sweating and suffocating, heart bursting from the effort of staying alive underneath that mountain of flesh? Tawnee-Angel, how did you fall so far?

How indeed?

Half of Tawnee began life in the testicles of William S. Fuller, a shift supervisor at the RiteWay glove factory in Davenport, Illinois. Bill was an ordained reverend in the Episcopalian Church, but left the cloth to marry and start a family with a local candy-striper, Susie Fuller. (Through an unbearably dull and complex string of coincidences, Fullers had married Fullers on at least fifteen occasions throughout the seventeen generations of the tribe’s American heritage. Some of the unions had been distant cousins, some closer cousins, some entirely unrelated, and on one occasion a Fuller man wed his half-sister. At any rate, a Fuller-Fuller bridal announcement wasn’t unprecedented in their circles. As far as anyone knew, Bill and Susie shared no genes.) Susie was a plump but attractively proportioned seventeen-year-old when Bill asked for her hand. She wouldn’t reach her true Fuller potential until after the children came.

The Fullers had three children: Robert, Tawnee, and Rachel. Robert came first, in the winter of 1970, followed by Tawnee in ’72 and Rachel the following spring. And so, in the year of their father’s Lord, 1988, the Fuller children were 17, 16, and 15. It was the year George Herbert Walker Bush was elected president of the United States. Wayne Gretzky was traded to the Los Angeles Kings. “Pour Some Sugar On Me” reached the number two spot on American charts. It was also the year Tawnee decided to become a martyr.

It sort of happened like this:

Modern research tells us that smell is the sense most linked to memory and nostalgia. You enter a house with a gas furnace and the right kind of carpet cleaner and suddenly you remember the titles of the sheet music in your grandfather’s piano. That kind of thing. It’s not something you can control and at any other point in your life outside of the smell the memory it conjures wouldn’t exist. If you tried for hours to describe your grandfather’s house you’d remember colors and events and stories in a general way, but not the copy of “American Jazz Standards” with the tattered red cover and missing page 48. The smell and the insignificant detail have become a matched pair that represents the value of something larger, like x- and y- coordinates on the sine curve of your life.

Even at sixteen, Tawnee carried an endless catalog of scent-specific memories. She had never encountered this smell until now, however, and while it’s unlikely that it could be duplicated anywhere else for her to smell it and recall the moment, the stench of a restaurant grease trap is hard to forget without the aid of severe neural injury.

She was in the basement of George Washington’s, a 24-hour diner owned by a Greek named Alex and “Proudly Serving Breakfast All Night Since 1976.” Tawnee stared in disbelief at the sight before her: two scruffy-looking teenage boys, each with randomly distributed patches of proto-facial hair, each wearing backwards baseball caps, rubber gloves, and knee-high rain boots, and each standing ankle-deep in a grayish-orange sludge that smelled like a human corpse slow-cooked in polyurethane.

“What happened?” she asked from the relative safety of the basement steps. Except she was covering her nose and mouth while also trying to breath without gagging, so it came out like, “Yeggh—whuhappuh?”

“The grease trap’s broken,” said Tom, the dishwasher she knew. The other kid’s name was Kenny or something. They were always together, but Kenny-or-whatever had social inferiority issues that caused him to say the most disgusting or offensive thing he could think of whenever he met new people to preempt their not liking him for other reasons. He also had hyperactive tendencies. He also spat when he talked. He also smelled, not intensely, but noticeably, like something Tawnee now recognized as the fermented remains of all the Heinz tomato ketchup, Velveeta cheddar cheese, Uncle Ben’s rice, Jimmy Dean beef stew, Green Giant spinach, Frank’s hot sauce, scrambled Egg Beaters, Hormel chili, Hidden Valley ranch dressing, bacon grease, pickle juice, soggy bread, bits of paper napkin, ground beef (both raw and cooked), French onion soup, mushrooms, shrimp tails, chicken fat, gravy, liquid margarine, cole slaw, alfredo sauce, StarKist chunk tuna, and Cannonball barbecue sauce that made it’s way down the drain of Alex’s dish pit when the boys cleared their sinks at the end of a shift. This hidden awful nastiness, the pinkish lake of basement filth that stretched between Tawnee and Tom, ran in the veins of the restaurant and everything that made the dining room and the kitchen and the bar and all the other above-ground operations such a sparkling testament to the success of the business.

“It would appear that way,” Tawnee said. (But again with the nose and mouth covered, so like, “Hehwhuappeeow”—you get it.) She looked around at the mess to indicate her understanding, then back at Tom. “So is it here?”

“Yeah,” said Kenny. Tawnee started and looked in his direction for the first time. “Gimme one second.” Kenny turned and sloshed off to a room filled with lockers in the opposite corner of the basement.

“I thought you were getting it,” Tawnee said.

“I don’t get it, he does,” Tom said. “You brought money, right?”

“Well, actually I figured you would just give it to me and I could pay later.”

“What? No, you don’t—”

“I was kidding.”

“You don’t front people, never do that.”

“I was kidding,” she said.

“Yeah, you just don’t do that.”

“Okay.”

Both turned as they heard a locker door slam. Kenny trudged up to the stairs and handed Tawnee a dark wad of dried something wrapped in the plastic from a pack of cigarettes. Tawnee gave him a ten-dollar bill.

“Thanks,” she said. “Sorry about the short notice.”

“She wanted you to front her,” Tom said. He laughed.

“You need a permit for that shit, Tawnee,” Kenny said. “You think you can handle it?”

Tawnee smiled. “Tom, you’ll be at the pool hall later?”

“I told her, dude, you just don’t front,” Tom said. “You never do that, right Ken?”

“Shit’ll knock you out, Tawnee,” Kenny said. He always teased people like this the first time they bought from him. “You need a permit, Tawnee, that’s the real Grade A stuff. I’m telling you, be careful.”

“Alright, well maybe I’ll stop by the pool hall later, okay?” Tawnee started up the stairs. “Bye Tom, thanks. Thanks Kenny.”

She walked up the stairs and through the swinging metal door at the top into the kitchen. Her car was parked on this side of the building. She found a side door and stepped out into the light.