Then a whole lot of things happened at once, but since they happened while I was deeply infatuated with a young mechanic with a motorcycle, I barely noticed them. First, Aunt Anna’s husband was admitted to the hospital. He was rarely mentioned in our household, because he drank and was supported by his wife. Aunt Anna was a seamstress and she often visited us on her way home, after she had dropped off some finished work at the company that she sewed for. When she visited, she and my mother laughed like two young girls, and my mother was like a different person. Maybe that was what she used to be like. Maybe she should have married a different husband and lived a very different life. In any case, I have only seen her happy when Aunt Anna was visiting. She was her only sister. Aunt Anna always kept her hat on because she only meant to stay ‘a brief moment’, as if the hat would contradict the truth, when she eventually left, that she had stayed several hours. My parents didn’t hide the fact that they hoped her husband would die. They wished it for her sake. To me her visits meant it was easier to slip out in the evening, because now my parents had something to talk about. Her husband did eventually die, and at the burial my aunt cried as if she were being whipped. I cried too, God knows why, because I had never met him. Afterward we went to a rather nice pub and had coffee. Not fifteen minutes had passed before my mother and my Aunt Anna were breathless with laughter over some occurrence from their childhood. My aunt had beautiful teeth with no cavities, which was highly unusual in my family. When we left the pub, my brother came over to me and said, ‘Lisa took off with another man. And I’m living in a room in Larslejstræde.’ He said it as if it didn’t affect him one bit, and I thought that was how it was. ‘Don’t tell our parents,’ he said, and I promised. Outside, my mechanic was waiting on his red motorcycle, and I sat down behind him without saying goodbye to anyone, because when my mother was around Aunt Anna, she forgot about everything else.