An old woman—a midwife of sorts—who checked on his mother in the aftermath of the accident and then after Frank’s brother was born, told him that anyone who washed clothes on New Year’s Day would wash (she said “warsh”) for the dead in the coming year. Frank’s mother looked at him when the woman said this, as if intending to put his mind at ease, even though her own eyes were filled with a look of worry. “I’ve seen it happen many a time,” the woman said, her gum bulging with snuff, and the oversized pockets of her apron filled with all kinds of rags and strings and collard leaves she said she would bind to Frank’s mother’s breasts “if they got heated and the milk wasn’t flowing good.”

His mother’s face blanched with the information, or maybe it was at the rendered beef fat the woman had offered to smooth on chapped or torn skin—“A cure for what ails you,” she had said—or maybe Frank’s mother was wondering if she had washed clothes the New Year’s before, the answer likely yes if Frank’s father had worked that day or the night before and come home, as he always did, with various stains on the sleeves of his white coat.

“How’s he sucking?” the woman said, and pointed to Horace, red and squirmy in Frank’s mother’s arms. “And how’s your hurts up the leg and your shoulder?”

Frank watched and listened, thinking surely his mother would be ready to go back to Lowell soon, back to where she had a real doctor and it didn’t smell like a butcher shop, back to where they had a life, but his mother assured him that there were fine doctors here and that she had seen several of them, that this woman, Mrs. Brewster, was there simply as a neighbor, trying to offer a helping hand.

Frank had told Lil this story, trying to remind both of them that people often mean well even when what they offer you is the last thing you would ever want to see. He said this after a neighbor tried to share with Lil her stash of coupons for denture gel and Depends. “No, thank you,” Lil told him when he had tried to encourage her to add that extra line of politeness so many people in this part of the world do: How sweet of you to think of me, though. So nice of you.

“But I don’t think it’s sweet,” Lil said. “These are my teeth, and my bladder is nobody’s business.”