And if the way the old lady looked wasn’t awful enough, she smelled, a rancid, slightly fulsome odor not unlike wet mold or slimy, ripe, worm-pocked meat. The old lady had emitted that stench long before her formerly thin lips sprung, or her skin went slippery-crepey. Anna remembered how Ma refused to wash any of the old lady’s things along with the old women’s garments. If Ma threw in as little as one pair of the old woman’s socks or panties, the whole wash smelled gamy, like an ill-dressed deer carcass hanging in the sun.
The fights they’d had over the wash had helped bring things to a head the summer before she and Ma left the house, even though Ma had offered to do a special load of the old lady’s things. But the possibility of not being part of the “family” had freaked the old lady o
