Read There Was an Old Woman for Free Online

wood lattice paneling that covered the gap between the house and ground. She couldn’t see anything, but she could certainly smell it. Raw sewage.
    Frustration welled up inside her. What next? Evie reached out and yanked on a nearby oak sapling that had already grown a foot tall. But it was too deeply rooted to budge, and all Evie had to show for her effort were fingers scraped raw. The rot in the house was deep rooted, too, nurtured by decades of unhappiness, fertilized with denial.
    Evie heard a tentative throat clearing. She pivoted away from the house and the sapling, a little embarrassed to have been caught taking her frustrations out on a weed. Standing on neatly mowed grass beyond her mother’s scraggly yard was a diminutive elderly woman, leaning on a cane. She had on a pink cardigan and a collared blouse with a double strand of fat white pearls around her neck.
    Evie brushed away tears she hadn’t even realized she’d shed. “Mrs. Yetner?” Amazing. The old woman was not only still alive but remarkably little changed aside from the cane and the back that was stooped rather than ramrod straight. Evie and Ginger had considered Mrs. Yetner ancient even when they were growing up.
    â€œGinger?” the woman said. She pulled a tissue from the wrist of her sweater sleeve and dabbed at her nose as she pinned Evie under her sharp, speculative gaze, magnified through thick glasses. “No, of course not. You’re the other one, aren’t you?”

Chapter Seven
    â€œRight, I’m the other one.” The girl stood and collected herself.
    She seemed to Mina to be so . . . vexed wasn’t quite the right word. More like at wit’s end. Well, who wouldn’t be, given the ungodly mess her mother’s house had turned into? And so fast.
    When Mina first spotted the girl—or woman, as they liked to be called these days, though the reasoning escaped her—maneuvering a mattress up against the side of Sandra Ferrante’s house, she assumed it had to be Ginger. But the minute the girl looked up, Mina realized this was the younger sister. The taller, ganglier one. Not the one who sold Girl Scout cookies but the one who kicked around a soccer ball and skinned her knees.
    â€œI’m Evie,” the girl told her.
    Eve. Now there was a name that didn’t go out of fashion. Not like Harriet. Or Freda. Mina had always been the only Mina anyone had heard of, except for every once in a while when vampires came back into fashion and people remembered the Mina who, despite Count Dracula’s attentions, had been saved and gotten married, as if that were preferable to an eternity of pure passion, forever and ever with no “death do us part.” Mina wondered where she’d put her copy of that book. She wouldn’t mind reading it again.
    â€œI had an older sister, too,” Mina said, and wondered why on God’s green earth she’d offered that up.
    â€œI didn’t know that.”
    Well, of course she didn’t. Annabelle had moved in with Mina a few years after the girls next door went off to college. Then—for what? Six years? No, eight—Mina and Annabelle been widowed sisters living in the house in which they’d grown up. And even with Annabelle gradually fading, like those early colored photographs in the album that lost their vividness even though they were rarely exposed to light, life was quite lovely really. So much simpler and less fractious without men around to make a mess and have opinions.
    Annabelle had been growing increasingly forgetful, even difficult at times, when the doctors confirmed their worst fear. Dementia. Progressive and unstoppable. Mina had been so determined to take care of her at home. All that changed a few years later when Mina was woken up in the middle of the night by a knock at the door. The nice young fellow who’d taken over running the store was standing on the step with his arm hooked in