Mum and Nic always said it like that—the Family Home—with capital letters. Maybe underlined and bolded as well. You’d think they were talking about some grand estate with a separate wing for each family member and stables and servants’ quarters ranging around it, rather than a 1960s two-bedroom brick cottage without even a driveway or inside laundry.

The legend. Lore? Fuck off, Josh. The legend told that a year or so after Nic and Michelle’s dad went to prison for the murder of his friend, a man with a jagged scar on his cheek and a blond ponytail turned up at the rental flat. He gave the girls a bag of chicken Twisties each and their mum told them to watch the cartoons and eat their treat and don’t bother the grown-ups. The Smurfs wasn’t even at the first ad break before the man patted them on their heads on his way out the door and their mum, who had done nothing but cry and talk on the phone since Dad went away, sat on the floor between them and took a handful of Michelle’s Twisties and, when she started to complain, she took a handful of Nic’s, and she gobbled them both at once leaving yellow dust all over her chin and hands and then sang ‘Everything is Going to Be Alright’, tickling them both until they joined in.

Soon after, the three of them moved into the house their mum bought with the money the ponytailed man had given her. A house in Leichhardt in 1982 was not too far out of reach for working people, but the Millers were mostly not working people and so a house was beyond their wildest. Fast forward twenty years, Nic and Michelle’s mum is diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer. She makes a will, signing the house over to her eldest, with the caveat that it would always be there for her other daughter to live in if she needed and that if Nic ever sold it the proceeds would be shared between the two of them.

Michelle was furious. Said their mum obviously felt sorry for Nic because she was clearly Not Quite Right and would never get married or have a house of her own, but why should she miss out just because she wasn’t a dim-witted old maid? Immediately after the funeral she started pressuring Nic to sell the house so the money could be divided between them. Nic, deep in grief (As if I wasn’t! Mum would protest to Lena and Will), declared that it was the Family Home and it would be dishonouring their mother to sell it. She told her sister the door was always open. Told her the kids, especially, would always have a home there. But it would be sold over her dead body.