"The last words I ever heard were my mother telling me to turn my music off and go to sleep, which wasn’t unreasonable, it being a Wednesday and she having to work early the next day. Mum crunches numbers in an office for a living. Statistics and other things I don’t understand, although I like that she has in her head a seemingly inexhaustible supply of facts and figures, like the odds of drowning in the bath (1/685,000) or the number of states, counties and townships named after George Washington (103). She scatters them like punctuation marks across nights when my sister and I are home, probably because they’re more likely to get a reaction than the things she’d rather tell us, such as number of children (2), love (infinite)."