A tidal wave of sixty cheap, frozen, rock-hard television dinners cascaded out across the floor — clattering, rattling, sliding in every direction, unopened plastic trays of Salisbury steak and fried chicken and gray peas spilling and skidding and piling up in a great frozen heap directly at Fiona’s designer-shod feet.

The room erupted in gasps of pure, scandalized horror.

A box of frozen Salisbury steak slid across the floor and bumped, with a hard little knock, against Fiona’s shoe, and she shrieked and leapt backward as though it were a live thing, one hand flying to her pearls.

“Sixty distinct dishes,” I said, into the ringing silence that followed.

“I counted them myself.

Not one missing, exactly as your son demanded, on pain of my being thrown into the street.