Before going into my room I focus my attention on the sounds of the house. Nothing. The moments I stand on the threshold of my room seem like an eternity. I am completely alone. Maybe she’s not coming back, I think, and although it’s a silly idea since her things are still there, it still upsets me. I hurt her, I tell myself, remembering how I’d yelled the morning before. Then, when it all seems like a huge problem, I see something under the bed. It’s a gift, but it’s not wrapped; there’s a ribbon around it and some candies on top. It’s a set of cloth handkerchiefs, the kind you carry in your pocket. The box they come in has some Chinese characters on it. I’ve seen similar ones before, my dad had shown them to me when he worked with the Koreans. A difficult language, he’d said, but to me the characters were more like pictures than words: the outline of a man walking, a house, the branches of a tree. I pick up the handkerchiefs. They’re white and embroidered with flowers in pastel colors. I’ve never received a gift like this before. I hear a door open and close. Someone comes up the stairs, the footsteps are almost imperceptible, as if the person weren’t wearing shoes.

“I was at the market,” says Aunt Nana, and she comes closer. I’m sitting on the bed, my head down, looking at the handkerchiefs in my hand. “It wasn’t easy for me to get under there,” she says, laughing and pointing to her curved back.

“I’m sorry,” I say, sobbing. She takes one of the handkerchiefs and dries my cheeks. It’s rough on the skin and barely gets wet.

“I have several of these,” says Aunt Nana. “They’ve come in handy a lot.”

After that, I’m never alone in the house again. I grow up at her side, and she gets old at mine. We found each other, I like to think, the way two children who don’t know each other meet freely and play all afternoon, trusting, far removed from caution, from adult suspicion. We watch the soaps, do each other’s hair. We make the list for the market: at first I dictate it and she writes, and over time we change roles, because by then it’s very hard for her to write. We don’t talk much—Aunt Nana is still a silent woman. In any case it isn’t necessary, we understand each other perfectly, and silence seems to be precisely the tie that binds us.