THEN WE WERE SITTING THERE, LILLY AND ME, AND she had made coffee and baked one of those chocolate cakes that are soft in the middle. That afternoon she’d also vacuumed and cleared the dead leaves off the windowsills. The budgie was no longer chattering in its cage but had been put to rest under a dish towel, and on the TV there was some show we could guess along with. When I’d come by in the afternoon, it hadn’t been so nice. We’d had a falling-out about her behavior, about the way she’d act up when we were at the senior club, her jealousy and her sweetness, which just seemed vulgar. And then she’d said that business about my face—that she didn’t like it. “You and your big professor mug,” she’d said, and the floor in the bathroom had been littered with laundry. She hadn’t made the bed either, and there was that sweetish smell of urine. I know that smell from Aunt Clara’s, back when she could no longer see and fumbled around and knocked everything over, especially herself. It was as if something dead had taken up permanent residence in her cells, and now it oozed out during her trips to the toilet. It settled into the wallpaper, and the odor was there when we would sit down to enjoy the fruit drink that I’d mix up out in her kitchen. Those long afternoons with flat fruit drink, peppermint candies, and Aunt Clara, who no longer fit her teeth. There are some things you never forget. The way we sang from the songbook, for instance, and her 26transcriptions of the King’s speeches on New Year’s Eve, and I’ve never understood why Aunt Clara’s loneliness required my involvement. I was just a boy, and while I sat there and had King Frederik’s words placed in my mouth, I suppose my folks were at the movie theater. “You’re so clever in school,” they’d say. “That sort of thing needs stimulation,” they’d say, and then Aunt Clara would be there with her fingers on my neck, the bowl of sugar cubes up in my face: “Take one, my boy, take two, eat!”

But now she’d made coffee, Lilly had, she’d made coffee and she’d covered the budgie and taken out the nice cups. There wasn’t any more talk about my face. Her little hand was up in my hair, inside the waist of my trousers, and she wanted to get hold of my hand, “Because now we we’re going to have us a cozy time and not talk any more about it.”