My parents told me to empty my farmhouse for their forty anniversary guests. I said my daughter was eleven days out of a bone-marrow transplant. Mum said: “Lock her upstairs.” I agreed — and on Saturday the sheriff was waiting at my gate.

PART 1

When my mother told me to keep my twelve-year-old upstairs while forty strangers had a party underneath her bedroom, something in me went completely quiet.

I had been arguing for about nine minutes. I had said the word transplant four times. I had said eleven days. I had read out, from a printed sheet on my fridge, the line about avoiding crowded indoor gatherings.

And my mother listened to all of it, and then she said, in the voice she uses for the parking at Christmas:

Well. Lock her upstairs.

And I said: all right.

She heard surrender. I know she did, because she moved straight on to the catering numbers.

What she did not hear was that I had just decided to clear that house exactly the way she had asked me to.

By Friday evening, the folding tables they kept in my barn were gone.

So