This drove him crazy, but he never let on.

He would go out with various women. Sometimes he brought them home and introduced them to his parents, mostly to give his mother a bit of hope.

He knew his parents were disappointed in him. No real job, no family.

You really couldn’t blame them.

Everything would have been different if that accident with Margareta hadn’t happened. He would not have lost his own bearings.

On Christmas Day it began to rain, and it kept raining all week. His mother did her best to pamper him. She prepared breakfast trays, and when he lay in bed waking up, he heard her careful knock on the door.

“My big boy,” she murmured, as she placed the breakfast tray on the bedside table.

Then he’d want to hug her and cry, but that gave him a bad taste in his mouth, so he lay still under the blanket, not moving.

He stayed until the day before New Year’s Eve. Then he couldn’t take it any longer: their breathing, their chewing, the sound of the TV at the highest possible volume. They were both over seventy. One of them would be dead soon and he didn’t know which one of them would have the hardest time being alone.

They had known each other since they were in their twenties.

He longed for his own cool apartment, where he could uncork a bottle of wine, solve the crossword puzzle, and listen to his own choice of music, Kraus and Frank Sinatra.

He told his mother that he was invited to a New Year’s Eve party.

He barely made it in the door when the phone rang. One of his women friends.

Dammit, he thought. I can’t take more of this.

“How’s it going?” she said girlishly.

“Fine. I just got home.”

“Were you with Kjell and Birgit?”

She had only met them once and already acted as if they were close.

“Yeah.”

“I thought so. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Uh-huh.”