"Naw."

"What you home so early for?"

"Because I feel like it, that's why."

He took the back steps at a bound and slammed the kitchen door behind
him. Ma Werner followed heavily after. Buzz was hanging his hat up
behind the kitchen door. He turned with a scowl as his mother entered.
She looked even more ludicrous in the house than she had outside, with
her skirts tucked up to make spading the easier, so that there was
displayed an unseemly length of thick ankle rising solidly above the old
pair of men's side-boots that encased her feet. The battered hat perched
rakishly atop her knob of gray-white hair gave her a jaunty, sporting
look, as of a ponderous, burlesque Watteau.

She abandoned pretense. "Ernie, your pa'll be awful mad. You know the
way he carried on the last time."

"Let him. He aint worked five days himself this month." Then, at a
sudden sound from the front of the house, "He ain't home, is he?"

"That's the shade flapping."

Buzz turned toward the inside wooden stairway that led to the half-story
above. But his mother followed, with surprising agility for so heavy a
woman. She put a hand on his arm. "Such a good-payin' job, Ernie. An'
you said only yesterday you liked it. Somethin' must've happened."