I reached for a wineglass, still filled with candy-pink wine, as Liz leaned back against a kitchen wall and closed her eyes. “No, thank you.”

I dumped the wine into the sink and turned on the faucet. She lifted her head as she heard the water.

“No. I said no, thank you.”

I stopped, glass still in hand. Liz had never raised her voice to me. I had never heard her raise her voice to anyone, save for maybe once when Luke smeared Vaseline all over the bathroom walls.

Liz’s eyes flashed in anger, something else I had never seen.

“Oh, sure. Sorry. I was just trying to help since you aren’t feeling so hot,” I said.

Liz didn’t reply, her eyes narrowing. I quickly put the glass down into the sink and turned to face her.

“I’ll get out of your way,” I said quickly as I sidestepped toward the back door.

I walked back to my front porch, bewildered by Liz’s behavior. Melissa had her palm pressed to her nose, the terrible smell in the air so thick it nearly had texture. The kids, of course, seemed unbothered, arguing and wrestling in the sprinkler.

“Did you find out what that smell is? I’ve never experienced anything quite so . . . ripe,” she said as she gagged a little.

“I think Liz is sick or something. She looks awful, like she has the flu,” I said. “And she’s not in the best of moods.”

“I wouldn’t be in the best mood either if my backyard smelled like a garbage dump,” Melissa said. She stood. “Sorry, I can’t deal with it. I have to keep working anyway, since my hangover is almost gone.” She checked her watch and gave a quick nod. Right on cue, almost noon. She waved her kids over and steered them down the street toward her house.

I tried to breathe through my mouth as I sat outside, knowing the kids would complain and argue even more inside, but the smell seemed to permeate everything. It filled my mouth and burned my lungs. It was like being surrounded by damp earth, with something dead inside.

And that’s when I realized what the smell reminded me of.

Last year, Mark and I had bought a deep freezer for the garage. We had plans to split a cow with Liz and Tim, although that never really happened because the farm we were going to buy it from went bankrupt due to the wife’s involvement in a Nigerian-prince email scam. So it sat in our garage, unused, for a month before we noticed a smell. We thought maybe a mouse had died in the garage, so we swept it out, set traps, but never found anything, and the smell persisted.

Finally, we opened the deep freezer and discovered the source.