No need to feel sorry for Rat for having a father she’s never met, who only gave up denying she was his when the DNA test proved it. Lots of kids Rat knows are way worse off. There was a story on TV about a man who didn’t feed the dogs when his wife went away on vacation, so the dogs ate their toddler.

Besides, hard to see how there’d be room for a man in their lives. Rat and her mother are close as sisters, sometimes twins. Vanessa is so small—child-size, really—they can wear each other’s clothes. When one of them has nightmares or there are people staying over or they just happen to feel like snuggling, Vanessa comes to sleep in Rat’s bed.

“How’re you coming along?” Vanessa asks now.

Rat grimaces, clutches the letter close. “Don’t look.”

Her mother pushes aside Rat’s sheltering hands, and examines the mangled cross-outs.

“You’re a real case,” she says, fondly. “Here.” Vanessa writes out three lines for Rat to copy. “Dear Daddy, Thank you for the birthday money. Love, Celia.” Easy-peasy.

Rat tries to summon up the diligence to replicate these lines, but her concentration’s shot. She hunches her shoulders, stretches, picks her nose, yawns.

“You finished, sweetheart?”

“I can’t do it,” Rat grumbles. “I hate writing.”

“Just get it done with, Ratkin.”

“I can’t.”

Vanessa reads the letter, folds it, and stashes it in her big patchwork carryall. “Okay? You’re finished.”

But Rat is hunched, sulky with failure.

Vanessa rumples her daughter’s hair, bends down to blow into her ear, to tickle her. No reaction.

“You’re done,” she repeats. Waves a hand in front of Rat’s eyes. “What are you going to do with the money?”

Rat shrugs.

“Come on, grump. Let’s go to the beach,” Vanessa says. “You can buy me an ice cream. A Magnum.”

“No way,” says Rat. “I’m not spending my birthday money on an ice cream.” But already she’s on her feet, searching for her sweatshirt, the bucket in which she collects sea glass and shells.

The thank-you letter that Rat was obliged to write to her father sticks in her mind as an unsettling anomaly in a life otherwise devoid of any such old-fashioned rites of good manners. Or, indeed, of any communications from her English relatives.

Some years later, when it strikes her that a father might come in handy, Rat asks her mother why they’ve never heard from him again.