Another Saturday breakfast on my own as Tante Anika fusses with Onkel Otto in their bedroom above. Onkel Otto is dying and has been doing so for months. There is nothing here in the house but that. No room for and anything to say other than how Onkel Otto fares. I go to the hallway and lace on my in-line skates. I call up the stairs that I am going out to the nearby park, Munich’s Alter Botanischer Garten. But if anyone hears me, they do not respond.

We live on Dachauser Strasse not far from the gardens, where I can skate on the pathways without fear of cars. I do so this morning, thinking of life and of how empty it is, the waiting for Onkel Otto to die. I don’t want him to die. He and Tante Anika have been good to me. But they didn’t have children of their own. They don’t know what to do with me, a fourteen-year-old boy. So, they do nothing.

In the park I pass the bench where Onkel Otto’s friend, Herr Klein is sitting, reading his newspaper. He is here every Saturday morning, reading his paper, letting it drop a bit, and smiling at me as I pass by. Herr Klein is about the only one who speaks to me this summer while I am out of school. He is old, like Onkel Otto, but he is robust. He is not ready to die. He is friendly too, the only one who asks how I am doing—what I am doing with my time.

I skate on the pathways in the Alter Botanischer Garten, all paths leading back around to where Herr Klein is sitting. He greets me, by name, Udo, with a smile, on one pass but then he is gone when I last skate by. It is the first time in two days that I have heard someone speak to me by name—speak to me at all. I skate over to the Park Café on the edge of the garden, on the Sophienstrasse side. Herr Klein is sitting at the café, as I knew he would be. Every Saturday morning it is the same with him. I sit down at the curb to tighten the laces on my skates.

“Komm her. Hab einege Kaffee und Kuchen, Udo—Come here. Have some coffee and cake,” I hear a voice say. It is, as I expected, Herr Klein, inviting me to his table at the café. I join him, and as I share coffee and cake with him, we talk. It is the first time since the previous Saturday that I have had a conversation with anyone. He asks about Onkel Otto’s health and how Tante Anika is doing. He and his wife were good friends of Otto’s and Anika’s when Otto was well and Herr Klein’s wife was alive. Herr Klein asks me about when my school starts again and about what a fourteen-year-old boy does in the summer.

I don’t do what most of the fourteen-year-old boys here do—at least not this summer. I don’t have any friends my age yet. I came to Tante Anika and Onkel Otto at the beginning of the summer, after school here had let out, when my parents died in the airplane accident. Onkel Otto already was sick and getting worse and Tante Anika’s time and attention was taken up with him. It was good of them to take me in under the conditions they faced. And they had never had children of their own.

I came too late to be enrolled in any summer activities or sports here, so it is a lonely summer for me. I like books and science, so I have lost myself in that—and taking my inline skating to the park. It was at the park where I first met Herr Klein and we learned we had Tante Anika and Onkel Otto in common—and loneliness—and some other interests as well.

So, it is a summer of losing my parents, living with serious sickness in the house, reading science and waiting for life to begin again, and skating—and Herr Klein. Above all else it is the summer of Herr Klein.

As we talk at the café table, he reaches over and lightly strokes my forearm with his fingers. He has done so before, and it is the only intimate touch I have received from other human beings this summer. He looks at me and I nod. Again I nod, knowing what that means, what I am agreeing to—as I did the previous Saturday and the Saturday before that, here in this café. Herr Klein isn’t surprised. I have followed him from the garden park to the café.

When the bill comes, Herr Klein takes his billfold out and lays fifteen euros on the table for the waiter and hands fifty euros to me. I don’t need the money, but he’d said, that first time, that he needed me to take the money. So, I do. I palm the money and put it in my pocket. When my hand comes back to the table top, Herr Klein take it in his hand and strokes the back of my hand with his fingers. He looks into my eyes, and I can see the loneliness in them fading away into an expression of gratitude. I know exactly how he feels.

He walks and I skate near him—not beside him, but in sight of him—back to the bank of flats on Karlstrasse where he lives—all alone in the same flat where he and his now-gone wife lived. In the vestibule of his flat, I sit on a bench and Herr Klein kneels in front of me, unlaces my skate boots, and tokes them off my feet. He looks up into my face as he slowly glides his hands up my legs and under the hem of my shorts—and higher, his fingers meeting at the quick of me. I sigh, spread the stance of my legs wider, and lean my shoulder blades back against the wall.

He is giving me attention, grasping me under the material of my shorts and briefs, stroking me. No one has even noticed I have been here all summer—no one but Herr Klein. I lift my legs as he slips my shorts and briefs off and then raises my arms for him to pull my T-shirt over my head. He lowers his head to my lap, and I give a little gasp and jerk as he takes me inside his mouth. I close my eyes and lay back, against the wall, and run my hands through the dark hair, shot with gray, on his head as his hands move everywhere on my body.