“Well?” she said.
“Of all the useless, idiotic, ill-timed, outrageous, unheard-of extravagance ever incurred by any brainless, gad-about, senseless, vain peacock of a woman—” Bony's father said.
“Henry! Stop right there!” Bony's mother said. “This time I will not listen to your abuse. Year after year I have put up with this browbeating. I go in rags, and if I so much as buy—”
“Rags!” Bony's father shouted. “Rags! You in rags? You dare taunt me with that, when you crowd enough on your back to support a dozen families? Rags? When from year's end to year's end I do nothing but struggle to pay your eternal bills!” Well, maybe I haven't got what Bony's father and mother said just the way they said it, but it was like that. So they had a good start and they went right on and pretty soon Bony's father was walking up and down the room, talking loud and pounding the table every time he passed it, and Bony's mother was sitting with a corner of her apron in each hand and the hands pressed to her cheeks. Her eyes were big and scary. So then Bony's father stopped in front of her and said a lot and she didn't talk back. So that made him mad and he took the tablecloth and jerked it and all the dishes fell on the floor and broke.
Bony just went to the bed and lay on his face and squeezed his hands into his ears. I guess he felt pretty mean. He was crying, but we didn't know that then. We found it out afterward.
So then, when all the dishes broke, Bony's mother sort of yelled and jumped up. Swatty said:
“Garsh! What's she going to do?”
But she didn't do anything like we thought she was going to. She bent down and picked up a dish that wasn't all smashed to pieces and put it on the table as easy as could be and then she untied her apron and folded it up and laid it over the back of a chair as neat as a pin. She looked at herself in the mirror in the sideboard and then walked around Bony's father and went toward the door into the hall.
“Where are you going?” Bony's father asked.
“Going?” she said, or something like that. “I'm going to see if I can't put a stop to this sort of thing. I have had enough years of it. I'm going to see Mr. Rascop.”