Granny Ng recognized the game. Her son used to play online poker until his wife found out and forced him to transfer all of his money to their joint account. The sound effects continued for some time, and from the increasingly frequent exclamations from the dealer—“You’re really cleaning up!” and “You’ve got the moves!”—Granny Ng surmised that he was on a winning streak. She felt happy for him: at least he had some consolation for the disappointments of the evening. Earlier, he had taken out a new shirt and ironed his pants, even opening a new tube of gel in an attempt to mold his hair. A few days before, Granny Ng had heard him on the phone with the young woman, agreeing that he needed to give his hair “some personality.” Still, it appeared as if the young woman had decided she didn’t want to spend the evening with him for some reason. Granny Ng had listened as he tried to sound understanding, saying that no, he hadn’t gone through a lot of trouble. She’d listened as he called to cancel the restaurant, as he washed the gel out of his hair in the bathroom sink, as he shoved the plate of food she’d made for him into the microwave. But now he was winning money online, and amidst the clamor of sound effects, she could hear him say, “Yes! Yes!”

She was happy for him, but her happiness would have been greater were she not in such desperate need of the toilet. Her bladder, she felt, was the only thing about her age that betrayed her in this situation, the only inconvenience. In an effort to reduce the frequency of her urination, she had taken to drinking only two glasses of water a day. It seemed to have some effect during the daytime—she only needed to use the toilet twice—but after 7 pm, when the young man returned and she had to stow herself away in the closet, the urge to urinate would visit her two to three times during the night. She’d made this discovery the hard way; on one of her first nights there, she had brought an empty half-liter water bottle and a funnel with her into the closet. This served its purpose until she woke in the middle of night with both a bladder and a bottle that needed to be emptied. She’d had to open the closet door, tiptoe to the window, and trickle the contents of the bottle onto the lawn before she could use it again. After that, she always brought a second half-liter bottle into the closet with her. In the mornings, after the young man had left for work, Granny Ng would go to the bathroom and disinfect the bottles and the funnel, filling them with diluted detergent and setting them under the taps in the bathtub for thirty minutes before rinsing them out.