Finally, she had asked her mother about God keeping tabs on her behavior. Her mother pooh-poohed her mother-in-law. “She’s a silly old woman. She was born Lutheran. If she would just settle on one church, any church, and meet some women her age, play bingo maybe, do things, go to a movie, instead of all that praying, she’d be a lot happier.”

It was a relief to Hannah when she grew older and came under the skeptical and cynical influence of her peers. She stopped attending church and began to think of God as man-made—until a teacher in high school, responding to a student’s question about God, said that the belief in someone or something greater than man existed in every culture, in every society, in all parts of the world. They had touched briefly, then, on the religious beliefs of Native Americans, Arabs, East Indians, the Japanese, and for the first time Hannah heard the words Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and “ancestor worship.”

At some point her father had said, “People make choices and create their own lives.” He pointed a long finger upward and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling of their porch. “God’s got wars, famine, floods, hurricanes to worry about. He hasn’t got time to waste on our day-to-day, petty little troubles.”

As Hannah considered Tyler’s question, the normal sounds, the hum of the refrigerator, cars passing on Cove Road, even the tapping of her fingers on the table, bypassed her consciousness. How should she respond to him? How did she feel about God now, today? God hadn’t intervened to stop Bill’s heavy fist from smashing down on her. He hadn’t driven the car when she escaped with two young children into the cold February night, nor had he fed her family while she struggled to get enough education to find a decent job to support them.

But then, that same February night, after Bill found her at a gas station in Michigan and shot the radiator of her car, making escape impossible, a burly truck driver had stepped forward and offered her and the children a ride, and they had taken it. He had seemed like an angel; perhaps he had been. She had spent a portion of that long ride from upper Michigan to New England thanking God.

When Dan, the great love of her life, died, she blamed God, but when, soon after, she had been contacted by her daughter Miranda, whom she had not seen in years, she thanked God and returned east to Pennsylvania. There Miranda and her husband loaned her funds to open a small plant nursery, and slowly, working with the earth and living things, Hannah’s spirit had healed.