Ruthy put her arm around me when she read my list. I noticed that she didn’t disagree. We didn’t move the beads on the string because Caleb wasn’t with us, but we agreed if he had been, we would probably have moved mine pretty much to the end of the rope.

In the past, I had been able to go over to see Mrs Johnson when I wasn’t sure about things, and she would sit and listen very quietly and patiently. She didn’t always know the answer, but she would pat my hand and smile at me and that made me feel that I wasn’t silly for having my thoughts. She told me life was an obstacle race, and I had to get fit enough to jump over each hurdle as I met it. I asked how to get fit to do that, and she said I had to have good friends to talk to, and that probably what I learned in church would be very helpful too. She didn’t believe in God, but she said any powerful belief could feed your heart and help you jump rather than falter. She said it was like physical food; we might all eat different things, such as we might all believe different things, but it all added up to nutrition for the body just as belief fed the soul.

This sounded a bit like Dad’s words about snakes and ladders, so it made me feel even more that my dad was very wise. And I certainly agreed with the idea that friends could help you because Anne King at Sunday school, and Maynard at school, and even Venita when she wasn’t fussing about clothes or what she looked like or her mother’s private parts, could somehow give me bits of energy to keep going. I said to myself it was like being plugged into a power socket and charged up. I thought this was a good analogy, and raced to tell Ruthy about it, who was impressed and wrote it down in her notebook. So it was terrible not being able to talk to Mrs Johnson about what was happening. I thought about breaking my promise and going to see her, but things were already so bad I decided it was just too risky.

I sat in Mr Driver’s garden next to Sixpence quite a bit, and sometimes wished and wished he would come and sit next to me and ask me what was going on, but he would just wave from his kitchen window, and I didn’t know what I could say to go and start a conversation with him.

One day though, when I was feeling very low, I started to cry on the little seat by Sixpence’s house. Mr Driver didn’t talk to me, but he came out of the house, picked me up, took me into the kitchen and sat in his chair with me on his knee. He put my head on his shoulder and patted me and said, ‘There, there, you’ll get another pet.’ Although I wasn’t really crying for Sixpence right then, that was about the most wonderful thing that had happened to me for a long time. I wished it would go on forever. Mr Driver smelled of wood and Palmolive soap and machine oil. His wrists were old and stringy and had lots of black dots and scars on them, but his arms were strong and he held me tight, and I wondered if God had sent me to Mr Driver because my Aunty Maisie says God never tests us beyond our endurance and I think I was nearly endured right out.