she sighed. She always did that when a quarrel started in the family.
"Oh, ma, please don't act like a martyr," Minnie begged, her temper collapsing at the sight of her mother's panic-stricken expression. "You always take everything too serious."
Mrs. Flynn sighed again. "I wish you two girls would try to get along better," she said in a thin, tired voice. "First it's one and then it's the other. Your pa was sayin' only the other night that he's never seen such a family for quarrelin'. It's just wearin' my life out."
Minnie sank down on a three-legged stool and watched for several minutes in silence while her mother peeled the potatoes. She noticed her mother's hands, large, swollen and red, and she wondered if they had ever been well-shaped like hers. Old friends of the family said that she looked like her mother, and Minnie searched, almost fearfully, for the resemblance. Her mother was ill-proportioned now, though she boasted of having been "skinnier" than Minnie, as she called it. Her thin gray hair had once been red. "Two thick red braids the size of your wrists," Michael Flynn always described them. Her eyes had lost their luster, her drooping mouth was grooved with fine wrinkles, and the years of neglect had rotted her teeth, once, little white even teeth like Minnie's.
"Ma, dear, it makes me sick to see you always workin' so hard," Minnie reached over to lay her arm across her mother's back as the latter bent over the stove. "When Billy gets his raise I don't see why we should wait any longer. We can afford to have a little place of our own, and that makes one less to cook and wash up after."
Mrs. Flynn turned to her placatingly. "Now, look here, Minnie. I don't want you goin' off and gettin' married just to make things easier for me. You're the kind of a girl that likes to have a good time, to be always on the go, a party here—
