“Look at her. Even here.”

Sarah’s father pointed across the wedding reception with a piece of chicken.

His daughter was looking at her phone.

Around her, guests were celebrating the marriage of her cousin, Maria Nasuuna. Chairs scraped. Music competed with conversations. An uncle who had arrived quietly was now dancing as though the bride had personally requested his knees.

“What is she doing?” I asked.

“What she does every day. Internet.”

He bit the chicken with the disappointment of a man whose school fees had purchased unlimited scrolling.

Sarah Nantume was twenty-seven. She lived with her family two miles outside Masaka city and had a master’s degree in sociology from Makerere.

Her father was headmaster of a medium-sized primary school. A man accustomed to asking a question and receiving an answer from forty people at once.

At home, he had given Sarah a clear route.

Go to school.

Get good grades.

After your first degree, do a master’s.

Then you are set.

Sarah had followed it faithfully. Now she was back home, and the man who had supplied the directions was unhappy with where she had arrived.

“She needs to get out there and do something useful,” he told me.

“Have you asked what she does online?”

“Applications, she says.”

He said “she says” the way a policeman might say “the suspect claims.”

Then Sarah approached our table.

“Dad, Auntie wants you for the photographs.”

“First tell Rwamiti what you were doing on that phone.”

She looked at me, then at the chicken.

“Checking whether someone had replied.”

“To what?”

“A job application.”

“Even at a wedding?”

“The deadline is tonight.”

Her father turned towards me. Here was his evidence.

I moved my chair.

“Sit a moment, Sarah.”

She sat on its edge, keeping her handbag on her lap.

“How many applications?”

She unlocked her phone.

“Six hundred and sixty-one.”

Her father stopped chewing.

“In the last year,” she added.

She had a spreadsheet. Organisation, position, application date, response, interview, follow-up. Rows and rows of effort, arranged neatly enough to suggest that disappointment could be managed if you used the correct columns.

“Interviews?” I asked.

“Fifty-three.”

“And offers?”

“None.”

At a nearby table, somebody shouted that marriage required patience.

For once, the wedding speeches were contributing to our conversation.

“Perhaps you are applying for the wrong things,” her father said.

“Some are in my field. Some aren’t. Graduate jobs. Assistant jobs. Administration. Research.”

“You cannot just keep sending things.”

Sarah looked down at the phone.

A waiter arrived to collect our plates. The headmaster held on to his. Apparently, the chicken still had something to contribute.

“Dad, I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”

He straightened.

“I’m considering going to Saudi Arabia. Domestic work.”

He put the plate down.

“As a housemaid?”

“Yes.”

“With a master’s from Makerere?”

The question came out loudly enough to attract a woman from the next table. She leaned towards us without moving her chair. A useful wedding skill.

“You are being impatient,” he said. “Something will show up.”

Sarah closed the spreadsheet.

“When?”

“You cannot put a date on everything.”

“I put dates on six hundred and sixty-one things.”

He looked towards the bridal table.

Maria and her husband were smiling for another photograph. People kept adjusting them: closer together, turn slightly, lift your chin.

Sarah watched them too.

“When relatives ask about me,” she said, “you tell them I’m still at home.”

“Well, you are.”

“You don’t tell them I’m applying. You tell them I’m still at home.”

Her father opened his mouth, then reached for his glass.

I understood his alarm. He had not spent years educating his daughter while imagining her leaving to clean someone else’s house. He worried about where she would live, who would employ her, whether she would be treated decently.

But those worries were now tangled with another injury.

This was not the ending he had announced.

“Headmaster,” I said, “if you give a pupil directions to your school, and later they close that road, what do you do?”

“Give another route.”

“Do you first punish the pupil for finding the road closed?”

He sighed.

“Rwamiti, employment is not a road.”

“No. Roads sometimes have signs explaining the delay.”

Sarah smiled briefly.

Her father did not.

“I am only asking her to be patient.”

“For how long?”

“Until something comes.”

Sarah shifted in her chair.

He turned to her.

“And you think Saudi Arabia is the answer?”

“I think I need to investigate it. I can’t keep waiting without considering anything else.”

That was the first thing she had said that evening which sounded less like a defence and more like a decision.

I leaned towards him.

“You told her a degree and a master’s would set her up. She did both.”

“Education is still important.”

“Yes. But you are speaking as though she has not obeyed you.”

He glanced at her phone.

For years, his instructions had ended with a job. Now his daughter had reached the end of the instructions and found another application form.

The script had changed. At their house, the expectations had kept their old timetable.

“Do you know what people will say?” he asked quietly.

Sarah’s shoulders dropped.

“You see?”

“I am also worried about you.”

“Then ask me about the work. Please.”

The music stopped abruptly. Someone announced that relatives were wanted for photographs.

We remained seated.

Her father asked, “Have you agreed to anything?”

“No.”

“Paid anyone?”

“No.”

He nodded.

“Tomorrow, show me what you have found. We need to know who is offering what.”

Sarah loosened her grip on her handbag.

“And you’ll look?”

“I said show me.”

It was still a headmaster’s answer. But it was an answer she could work with.

“Bring the applications too,” he added.

“All six hundred and sixty-one?”

“Sarah.”

She stood, smiling now.

“Your homework, Dad.”

He rose slowly and straightened his jacket.

Then he turned to me.

“Rwamiti, surely something will show up.”

“Tomorrow,” I said, “your daughter will. Start there.”

Across the room, the photographer waved impatiently.

“Father of Sarah! We are waiting!”

The headmaster went to stand beside his daughter.

For this photograph, at least, nobody asked him to point the way.

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The uncle your parents should probably never have introduced you to.