was quite silly to kneel before her mother’s door and pray, but she hated the task so much and she hated herself for hating it that she felt little choice but to beseech the Bless’d Virgin for strength. The sad truth was, her mother’s body was dying—for years from the outside in, more recently from the inside out—and it needed cleaning.

Certain her stepfather was already out for the day—she had heard him leave at the crack of dawn—she knocked softly on the door. A groan issued from inside the room, a groan being the only sound her mother could muster.

“Buongiorno, Mama,” Mari said with what she hoped was a believable cheerfulness as she entered and approached her mother’s bedside. Mari’s mother looked at her daughter and with the half of her face that could still manage, she smiled. Mari set down the buckets of water, the washcloth and the bar of olive oil soap. She stepped to the window and drew back the curtains, spilling the room with morning sunlight. The room had two beds set a good eight feet apart. Her mother and stepfather did not sleep together. In fact, most often, he slept on a feather-mat in his study. Mari pulled over a chair for her mother to brace herself, then bent down and, with a heave, lifted her mother upright and seated at the edge of her bed.

Mari tried her best not to make a face, but her mother was not so broken that she could not perceive the tiny flutter of revulsion that rippled her daughter’s countenance. The smell was that bad.

Now Mari smiled and brightened her eyes, doing everything she could to protect the dignity of her mother. “Did La Regina have a good sleep?” Mari asked playfully. She always called her mother The Queen before she bathed her. It was what Mari’s father had called his wife, La Regina, and Mari La Principessa.

Mari’s mother pressed her good right arm into the mattress as her daughter supported and pulled from under her mother’s lame left arm. Working together, La Regina was brought to her feet. In a practiced motion, Mari smoothly slid the chair closer so her mother could brace herself upon its sturdy back. Subtly, Mari stepped to her mother’s side to block her view in case she turned her neck to see what Mari caught in the corner of her eye and what she’d come to realize over the last several months to be something of a doleful morning certainty. Once again, her mother’s cream-colored sleeping gown was stained.

The breakdown of her mother’s body began acutely, some ten years ago, when Mari was just nine years old, three weeks after the death of her father. Her mother, overwhelmed with grief since her husband’s undoing, had barely brought a crumb of food or a drop of water to her lips. Her misery, however, was not enough to keep the nasty old padre from informing her that if she did not find a new husband within one hundred and twenty days, the farm, the mill—all of it—would be confiscated by the church, for your own protection, of course. In a fit of anguish, Mari’s mother wandered off into the olive orchard to be among the trees her husband had tended for nearly all his life. It was an unusually warm day for early October and, by the late afternoon, Mari’s mother collapsed to the ground, burnt, exhausted and severely dehydrated from a full day in the sun. When she regained consciousness, some two weeks later, nothing about her was the same.

Apoplexia: struck down with violence, was how Hippocrates first defined it. And the violence had struck Mari’s mother with a heartless ferocity. The whole left side of her face wilted, like a candle left out in the sun. Her left arm hung, near-useless, and her left leg had but a fraction of its former vitality, encumbering her with a dramatic limp. She could walk, yes, but her gait was slow and plodding, and if there was any distance to cover, she required a cane in her right hand and a strong body on her left. Her speech and tongue too seemed to have lost their way. But saddest to Mari was the state of her mother’s will, seemingly more damaged and depressed than any part of her body. In the months and years that followed, the limp abated slightly, her eye strengthened to open a fraction wider and her left arm grew just strong enough