[FingerLakes]

My grandmother, the hoarder who hid her cancer from us possibly for years, loved to bake. She baked cakes and pies and bread. Little ones in little cute pans she ordered all the time from those shopping booklets that everyone throws out as soon as they come in the mail.

But a few years ago, after noticing how the roaches in her apartment no longer feared the light or sounds of people coming into the room, I started to become suspicious of the quality of the food we were getting. Once she baked a cake for my niece's birthday and, knowing that she likes to cool the cake on the table while baking others, I flipped it and checked the underside. The bottom of the cake had a handful of smooshed roach corpses on it. I dunno if they were baked in or just died eating it. I tossed out the cake and everything she sent up to us after that.

So Carmen shouldn't tell the old folks they suck but just toss everything out if they seem dodgy in terms of cleanliness.