She didn't yell at anybody.
She stood in the archway for maybe ten seconds without moving. The headlamp threw a white circle on the ceiling over the table. Then she reached up and turned it off, click, and slid the satchel off her shoulder and set it on the recliner, my father's recliner, the real one, which nobody sits in. She came into the dining room. She stepped around the puddle. She looked at the panel, which I had propped back up against the china cabinet, face out, so she would see it, so she would see exactly what had been done.
She looked at it the way she looks at an address she can't read. Close, and then far, and then close again, with her head a little tipped.
"Mom," I said.
"Hang on, baby."
"She did it on purpose. She said—"
"I know. Hang on." She didn't look at me. She didn't look at Krista either. She was looking at the board. She reached out and touched the bare white triangle where the roof had been, just with one fingertip, and then she touched the ragged hole in the upstairs right window, where the plywood showed through. She touched the edge of it. Then she touched her own window, the kitchen window, her with her feet in the dishpan, which was perfect, without a mark on it.
"She went right around me," my mother said.
Nobody said anything.