He paused, and said, ‘Tell them I’ll send my magic socks down to pick them up later.’

Season appeared in the doorway, holding his boots in her hand. ‘Take the goddamned things now!’ she snapped, and hurled them after him, one at a time. ‘Every time you come home you make the living-room look like a goddamned thrift store!’

The boots clumped on the stairs and then rolled back down again. Season kicked them across the hallway and then stalked back into the living-room. Ed slowly descended the staircase, collected them up, and went up to see Sally with an expression that Season had once described as his ‘Grant Wood face’.

Sally was lying curled up in her old-fashioned carved oak bed, under the early-American patchwork comforter that Season had bought for her at a fashionable store on Lexington Avenue in the eighties. She was almost asleep, but not quite, and when Ed looked in at the door, she stirred and raised her head from the pillow and smiled at him.

‘Hi, Daddy,’ she said, sleepily.

‘Hi yourself.’

‘I waited for you but you didn’t come home. Mommy threw your supper down the sink-disposal.’

‘I know,’ said Ed, sitting on the edge of the bed and running his hand through his daughter’s long blonde curls. ‘Dilys is going to fix me an omelette.’

‘You’ll have indigestion if you don’t eat regular. My teacher told me.’

‘Your teacher’s quite right. I was busy on the farm, that’s all. Some of the wheat went bad.’

Sally looked up at him. Although she was only six years old, she looked exactly like her mother. Fair-haired and leggy, with those wide blue eyes like some startled character out of a Disney cartoon. Ed leaned over her and kissed her, and she had that childish smell of soap and cookies and clean clothes.

‘I love you,’ he said, with a grin.

‘I love you, too,’ she told him.

They were silent for a moment. Then Sally said, ‘Is this a darned farm?’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I don’t know. Mommy was talking on the telephone to Auntie Vee today and she kept saying “this darned farm”.’ Ed touched the tip of her nose with his finger. ‘Darned is one of those words that grown-ups use when they mean pesky.’

‘What does pesky mean?’

‘It means something that irritates you. Something that gets on your nerves.’

‘Does the farm get on Mommy’s nerves?’

‘Sure it does. It gets on my nerves sometimes. But it’s important. It’s what people call a heritage. It’s something that’s been handed down from father to son, something that belongs to one family, and stands for everything that family is. You’re a Hardesty, see, and this is the Hardesty farm. When people meet you, they think – aha, that’s the little girl who lives on the big wheat farm in Kingman County, Kansas.’