Their house looked like it had been cut out of butter – a soft, yellow rectangle that could melt or collapse, and maybe would be gone by morning. Edith thought it stood out from the other houses. She was riding her bicycle home from the cigarette vending machine at the corner grocery, and it was deserted the whole way. The handle of the Big Dipper was pointing down, right at her, and the moon was shining bright as she passed the cemetery’s little pointed chapel, which stood like a fragile cut-out silhouette, the kind children make from layers of thin paper. Edith got off her bicycle and opened the heavy garden gate. Then she parked her bike and stood with her back to the house for several minutes, looking at the stars, the road, and the trees at the edge of the woods, which rose like a steep cliff. She recalled their trip to Spain, where, to her disappointment, she had felt nothing on seeing real mountains for the first time in her life. Why was that? And it was the mountains she had been looking forward to. She wished that someone she knew might walk by. Her neighbor, for example. ‘Good evening, Mr Bruun,’ she would say if he paused. ‘What lovely weather!’ ‘Yes,’ he would answer. ‘It’s rare to have such beautiful weather at the end of September.’ It would help to say something like that to someone who happened to pass by. But no one came. People were sitting in their houses behind rolled-down shades, and maybe with a lit wood stove, since it was cold, and she would have said that to Mr Bruun too. There was practically no end to things like that which a person could say, and while she talked this way in a bright, upbeat voice to her children, to customers or to the morning housekeeper, she kept alive a vague uncertain hope – a child’s hope, a child’s anxious evening prayer: Dear God, Let everything be like before! Let my daddy come back!