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Kolb often came over, and I remember the sound of their giggling about boys and whatever secrets schoolgirls share. You could say she had an active fantasy life, though she wasn’t particularly introverted, and maybe, as a child, was a little afraid of the real world. She spooked easily, Bob remembers. But more, he remembers her endearing laughter.
    Terri began to draw when she got to junior high. Almost all her pictures were of animals—dogs and horses mostly—and we thought they were terrific. None of the rest of us had any artistic talent whatsoever, and we were awed by this aspect of her. It showed us a side of her that touched us all.
    The Kolbs twice took her to Disney World, once when she was fourteen, then again at seventeen, and she fell in love with it. We had taken her earlier, but these trips with the Kolbs seemed to make a bigger impression on her. She asked us for a Mickey Mouse phone, and she drew all the Disney characters with remarkable skill. We have her drawings, of course. They are a way we remain in contact with her.
    She used to kid us about wanting to work at Disney World but then, after she’d seen Joan Embrey on television, decided to become a veterinarian at the San Diego Zoo. We told her that to become a certified veterinarian she’d need a college degree—Bob was pushing her in that direction, anyway. She wrote to Ms. Embrey and received an answer. “You were right,” she admitted to her father. “Joan Embrey told me I’m never going to be able to work at the zoo unless I go to college.” To Suzanne, she revealed that she’d become a veterinarian assistant because she didn’t want to go through all that school.
    Terri was a chunky child, not a fat one. But when at age twelve she returned from a month spent with her grandparents in Corning, it looked like she had swallowed a watermelon. Her Mema, overweight herself, was a great cook and thought nothing of stuffing Terri without caring about the calories. And when Terri went to high school, for some reason she just kept gaining every year, eventually reaching upwards of two hundred pounds (she was five foot five), to the point where we worried about it. She never mentioned it herself, but I remember shopping with her, and her tearful refusal to buy the prettiest dress she picked out because she thought she looked so ugly in it. With the exception of Sue Kolb, her other friends were overweight, too, reinforcing each other and keeping her and them out of the mainstream social life of their high school class.
    Suzanne, who always looked up to her, tells us she often wanted to go into Terri’s room to see what she and her friends were doing. “Sometimes she was kind enough to let me in. But a lot of the times she kept the door shut and wouldn’t let me enter. I never resented it. More often than not, Bobby and Terri had more of a connection because they were thirteen months apart, and I was viewed as the spoiled little sibling—the baby. So I was teased a lot. I was very different than Terri. I was more outgoing, I was more athletic. I was always doing stuff, and she really was the homebody. Terri was about five years older than me, and she really confided more in her girlfriends than she did in me. After she was married, though, I would hear about Michael.”
    We were concerned that Terri didn’t date and refused to go to any of the proms, but she seemed happy. (Indeed, she was capable—rarely—of spontaneous gaiety. Bob remembers how it “knocked his socks off” when, at a Tony Orlando and Dawn concert, she rushed onstage when Tony Orlando asked for volunteers from the audience.)
    I took her to Dr. Ickler, her pediatrician, to ask for advice about her weight. He examined Terri, then looked her in the eyes. “When you’re ready to lose weight, you’ll know it. Then we’ll talk.” He turned to me. “Now, Mom, I don’t want you to bug her. I don’t want you to push her or say anything about it because when Terri’s ready to