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previous summer Lotte had gone to that great clog-dancing competition in the sky and Mr Prior had sold the house and gone into sheltered housing.)
    Mam didn't seem to hear me so I said, 'Mam! It's time to get ready for Mass. I'll drive you.'
    'I'm not going.'
    My stomach plunged. 'OK, I'll come with you.'
    'Didn't I just say I'm not going? They'll all be looking at me.'
    I employed the line that she'd fed me throughout my life every time I'd been self-conscious. 'Don't be silly,' I said. 'They're far more interested in themselves. Who'd be bothered looking at you?'
    'All of them,' she said woefully, and actually, she was right. Under regular conditions, eleven o'clock Mass counted as a 'promenade'. For Mam and her cronies it counted as 'going out'. If someone in the cul-de-sac got a new winter coat, the first time it was unveiled to the public was at eleven o'clock Mass. But now that Mam was a deserted wife, she'd knock any new winter coats off today's agenda — and there was bound to be one or two, it was January, it was Sales time. All mutterings and sly glances would be directed at Mam and her abandonedness, completely bypassing, say, the maroon wool/polyester mix topcoat that Mrs Parsons might have bought at a whopping seventy-five per cent off.
    So Mam didn't go to Mass, she spent yet another day in her dressing-gown and now she was refusing to hear me.
    'Mam, please look at me. I've really got to go to work tomorrow.'
    I turned the telly off altogether and she turned to me, wounded, 'I was watching that.'
    'You weren't.'
    'Take tomorrow off.'
    'Mam, I have to go to work in the morning because over the next four days every second counts.'
    'That's just bad planning, leaving everything until the last minute.'
    'It's not. The marquee costs twenty thousand euros a day to rent so we have to cram everything into the few days we have it for.'
    'Can't Andrea do it?'
    'No, it's my responsibility.'
    'So what time will you be home at?'
    Panic rose in me. Normally I'd live on site for a job like this, so that every moment that wasn't spent working was devoted to catching up on precious sleep. But it looked like I'd be doing the hour-and-twenty-minute drive from Dublin to Kildare and back, every day. Two hours and forty minutes of lost sleep. A day. Aaagh!
    On Monday morning when the clock went off at 6 a.m., I was crying. Not just because it was 6 a.m. on a Monday morning but because I missed my dad.
    It had been the strangest week of my life — I'd been so shocked and trying so hard to mind Mam. Now all the other stuff had gone and sad was all I felt.
    Tears spilled onto my pillow. With child-like unreasonableness, I wanted Dad to never have left and for everything to be the way it had always been.
    He was my dad and home was where he should be. He was a quiet man who'd left most of the talking to my mother but still, his absence in the house was almost tangible.
    This had to be my fault. I'd neglected him. I'd neglected the pair of them. All because I had thought they were very happy together. In fact, I hadn't thought about it, that's how happy they seemed. They'd never given me a moment's worry, just jogged along nicely, seeming extremely fond of each other. OK, Dad worked and played golf and Mam was at home all day but they had plenty of shared hobbies — crosswords, drives to Wicklow to look at the scenery and they were very keen on gentle murder-in-the-community programmes, Morse, Midsomer Murders etc. Once they even went away for a Murder Mystery weekend although I don't think it was quite what they'd hoped for: they'd been looking forward to a serious murder investigation-style thing, with a 'crime', and a series of clues which would lead them to the villain. Instead they were plied with drink, bundled into wardrobes and groped by giggling co-sleuths.
    Had Dad been unhappy for a long time? He'd always been such a nice mild-mannered person but had this been a cloak for something darker, like depression? Had he spent years