was finally their turn, the child started to jump up and down, clapping her hands in her little red mittens. She was wearing a funny little hat with a bell on it, and when she hopped around, it made a tinkling sound that, to Gabriella, seemed to be full of the magic of Christmas. But suddenly as she jumped, she stumbled and fell down, and without hesitating, her mother reached down and yanked her to her feet by one arm, and the child began to cry and hold her arm, while her mother shouted at her.
“I told you to stop that, now you got what you deserved. And if you do it again, Allison, I swear I'm going to slap you.” Gabriella stopped what she was doing, and stood and stared at them, forgetting all about the customers whose orders she had just taken. She was mesmerized by what she had just seen, and the familiar words, and she was watching the expression on the woman's face. There was something particularly vicious about it, and the child standing next to her was still crying. The quick yank on her arm seemed to have dislocated it, and she was crying ever more loudly as she held it. It had happened that way to Gabriella once, her mother had pulled hard on her arm, and pulled her elbow right out of the socket, and she still remembered vividly what it felt like. Her father had gently put it back for her eventually, with a sharp twist and a turn. Later her parents had fought about it, and then her mother had gone after her in earnest. But this woman was furious now as the child continued to wail, and Gabriella walked slowly over to her to suggest that the arm, or the elbow more precisely, might have been dislocated.
“Don't be ridiculous,” the woman snapped at her as the Baums watched, “she's just whining. She's fine.” But Allison looked anything but fine as she continued to clutch her elbow. “Now, do you want a gingerbread house or not?” she shouted at her then, yanking on the arm again, and everyone who watched them winced in unison. It was obvious that this time her mother had really hurt her. “Allison, if you don't stop crying, I'm going to pull your pants down right here and spank you in front of all these people.”
“No, you're not,” Gabriella said quietly, with a power she had never felt in her life, a rush of adrenaline that suddenly surged through her. But this was not going to happen twice, and she was not going to stand there and watch the woman do it. “You're not going to do anything of the sort.”
“What right do you have to interfere with my disciplining my daughter?” The woman looked outraged. She was wearing a mink coat and she had walked over from Madison, on her way back to their Park Avenue apartment. But the scene was all too familiar to Gabriella. And the word discipline set off a bell in her heart that sounded like a death knell to her as she listened.
“You're not disciplining her,” Gabriella answered her in a voice she didn't recognize herself, “you're humiliating her, and torturing her in front of all these people. Why don't you tell her you're sorry? Why don't you fix her arm? If you take her coat off, you'll see that it's dislocated.”
With that the woman turned to Mr. Baum with an aristocratic look of outrage. “Who is this girl? How dare she speak to me that way?” And with that, as the child continued to cry, the mother gave another hard yank on her arm, and the child let out a yowl that almost ruptured Gabriella's remaining eardrum. And without thinking twice, she gently pulled the child away from her mother's hand, and began taking her little red coat off. It came off easily and she saw instantly that what she had suspected had in fact happened. The arm dangled uselessly and the child screamed the moment Gabriella touched it.
“Take your hands off my child!” the woman was screaming. “Someone call the police,” and with that, Gabriella turned around, and spoke to her in a voice that almost sounded like the devil.
“Yes, let's call the police, and explain to them what you've been doing to her. And if you make another sound, I'm going to slap you right in front of all these people,” and with that, as the woman stared