My aunt had an operation, and people at the hospital told her she would soon make a full recovery, but that she would need to be nursed and cared for until she regained her strength. Did she have any family she could live with? My mother was more than excited for her to come and live with us, and she was installed in my father’s bed. Then he had to sleep on the lumpy sofa in the ice-cold living room, and I woke constantly to his snoring through the thin curtain, until I got used to it. Now there was another mouth to feed, but, as it turned out, it didn’t matter, because my aunt was too sick to eat. My mother spent all her time at the bedside, and in the beginning we could hear their continual, familiar chuckling and babbling from the bedroom. My father resumed his habit of sleeping a couple of hours after dinner, now that my mother’s reproachful stare didn’t force him to sit paging for hours through the old encyclopedia. I could go wherever I wanted. But I didn’t go anywhere, because I had received a reply from the magazine. They wanted to publish two of my poems, which the editor found ‘extremely promising’, As if with the wave of a magic wand, this message changed my entire identity, my entire outlook on life. It occurred to me that everything I had loved about Kurt wouldn’t work in the elite literary circle in which I would soon be moving. Within a few days I sloughed off my infatuation and got invited to dinner by the editor of the magazine, and in a fog of newfound pride I received my termination notice from the tin box company, after the president had discovered me in the attic in the middle of writing a poem on brown packing paper. I hurried out to the editor, an unmarried, middle-aged man, the type who loved to be surrounded by young people. He comforted me by saying that I could definitely live by my pen, and if I ran into trouble, he had always seen it as his mission to support the arts.