When they had guests, her mother laughed while she told the story of Hanne running up to window cleaners and different men she saw to ask them if they would marry her mother. Hanne didn’t think it was funny, because without a daddy in the house, they would die of hunger. And she had no interest in dying and going down in the ground with no blanket over her at night. Evidently you turned into an angel and could fly up to God, but what if he came too late with your wings because there were too many others who died just at that moment, and he had to take care of all of them himself, just like her mother, since now they didn’t have enough money for a nanny?

Her little brother was sleeping, and Hanne lay scratching the paint off her bed’s blue rails. She never fell asleep before she heard her mother and father go to bed, and sometimes not until they had stopped talking in their bedroom and she was sure they were sleeping, so nothing could change during the course of the night.

They were still talking, down in the living room. Their quiet alone-voices, with her father’s laughter and long pauses in between, made her head hurt, like when her little brother dumped all his blocks down on the floor at once. Maybe they were kissing one another, because that was part of being married, but not when the children are looking, because it’s not good for them. ‘Wait until we’re alone,’ her mother said once. ‘It would be a sin for the child to see us.’ Why would it be a sin? Sin had something to do with God and bedtime prayers.

Hanne lay down on her back and folded her hands on top of the comforter. Then God was in the room, but you couldn’t see him, even if you turned on the light. Hanne imagined that he looked like her real father, who was the biggest and strongest man in the whole world. She closed her eyes and whispered the best of all bedtime prayers:

Now I lay down in my bed

close my eyes and bow my head

Dear Lord, please look down with grace

upon our shabby rented place.

Then she sighed, sleepy and serene, until her thoughts came streaming back like hungry birds to a spring garden bed.