Frederik stood up and went to the refrigerated case next to the register, passing the man at the slot machine, who didn’t even turn to look at him. Suddenly I was glad we were going to go to the village. That way there would be people who could attest that Frederik had really been here. The man playing the slot machine and the snack bar owner were not reliable witnesses. They were, unbelievably, busy with other things than Frederik, busy with a gambling machine and a deep-fat fryer.

When Frederik was back at the table with me, he beamed at me with his light-colored eyes—which, as the optician would later tell me, were a shade of cyan blue—as if the Coke were some hidden treasure. He held a bottle out to me. I took it and noticed I was no longer trembling. How nice it is that you’re here, I thought. Frederik laughed and leaned backward. “It’s nice to be here,” he said, in a relieved tone, as if he hadn’t been at all sure.

We spent the night an arm’s length away from each other; he was lying on the couch, I in my bed. The cowl lay draped over the chair like a ghost who had fainted. I’d been afraid that underneath it, Frederik might be wearing special Buddhist underwear that looked like a sumo wrestler’s belt, but he wore what ordinary people do.

Frederik had moved the fold-out couch so he wouldn’t have to look at the crooked bookcase. We both stared at the ceiling as if someone had announced that in a few minutes a prizewinning documentary would be shown on it. I didn’t know how noticeably I was not sleeping until at some point Frederik said, “You need to sleep, Luisa.”

“But I’m not making any noise.”

“I can hear you not making any noise from here.”

In the middle of the night, as Frederik and I were patiently waiting for the documentary to be screened on the ceiling, my mother woke with a start in Alberto’s bed.

It was three o’clock in the morning. Alberto was not next to her. He often got up at night to compose new ice-cream sundaes in the parlor downstairs. My mother looked at the empty space next to her and the blanket that had been thrown aside. It took her a moment to realize that something else was missing besides Alberto.

It was the eternal question of whether or not she should leave my father. The question had disappeared, and my mother suddenly knew for certain that it would never come back, because in the moment that she had sat bolt upright, she had left my father.

She sank back on the pillows and looked at the dark, bare light bulb over Alberto’s bed.