After her mother had gone, Martha continued to do all the things she’d always done. She baked bread, she went to town for groceries, she fed the chickens and gathered the eggs. She set three places at the table, and cleared away two unused.

Sometimes she missed them, but most of the time she just missed all the things they used to do.

Father used to yell a lot. “Tell your retard to chop some wood and start stacking it,” he’d say to her mother. Martha would see the stricken look on her mother’s face and get up to chop wood. She didn’t know why mother looked that way. Mother called her Martha; Father called her Retard.

As the years went by, she noticed that no one yelled at her anymore, so she stopped chopping wood, mowing the lawn, and canning peaches. She hated canning the peaches. But she made bread. It was good, squishing the dough, and the white all over her hands and wrists and the counter and the floor. She made bread until the refrigerator was full, and she piled it up on the counter until it turned black and musty. Then she fed it to the chickens. “Chickens gotta eat,” she’d coo as she sprinkled the bread crumbs in front of their house.

She was never allowed in the barn, so when the terrible awful smell came from there, some people came and brought her things to eat while they burned the barn so she didn’t have to think about it anymore.

Since Martha wasn’t chopping so much wood and canning peaches and mowing the lawn, she had a lot of time to herself. She did a lot of wondering. She would stand in the wooden doorway to her little home and look out and wonder how the weeds got so high, and would they get as high as the roof. She never found out, though, because now and then a nice boy from town would bring his big machine and mow them down. She sat at the scrubbed table and fingered the wide glossy pink-white scars that ran all around her nose and wondered where they came from. She wondered where the sofa came from, and how come there were always baby chickens and what made the stove hot. And then she’d get dressed up and go to town and buy more yeast and flour and sometimes Mr. McRae, the shopkeeper, would give her a cookie or some other little treat.