I returned to the waiting room to find grandfather dozing. I draped his coat over him. He shook his head awake. He looked at me and his face fell. I turned away to try to hide the streaks of tears. It was too late.

“Go home,” he said softly. “I’m worried we left the stove on.”

“There is no way the stove is on.” I almost laughed. It was grandmother’s job to fret about the stove being left on. How many times had we circled back to the house to confirm it was indeed off? “We had hot pot for dinner.”

“But then grandmother used the stove to braise eggs. Please go check. It is really worrying me.”

“I’m not going to leave you by yourself—”

“Go home, check the stove, and sleep. Then you can take over sitting here and I’ll get to sleep peacefully. Okay?”

He was trying to get me to leave. It was too easy to imagine the worst here. Even he knew I was weak. I crumpled in the seat next to him.

“Okay,” I said finally because I was tired, because I was afraid, and because I thought it might be the last time I could act like a child, like their grandchild, shielded and loved. He handed me his T pass.

I was the only one on the bus. The house was dark when I got home.

The stove was off. I twisted the knobs again to give my hands something to do. I turned the knobs on, off, on, off, watching the flame flicker alive and wipe back to darkness just as quickly. Sudden memories came—grandmother cooking, arranging a little altar. I don’t know the occasion, but pictures of family I never knew would sometimes appear on the dining table, fruits laid out on red plates before them. A cushion from our couch on the floor. Incense burning on either side of the frames. She and grandfather would take turns kneeling on the cushion, bowing to the portraits. Not all of them had been captured by a camera. A few were pencil sketches done by grandmother. I knelt beside them, even though I didn’t understand what I was doing. The memory was so vivid: grandmother digging through the drawer searching for a lighter and instead sticking a bundle of incense directly into the stove’s flame before whisking them to the altar.

Without quite realizing what I was doing, I went to search for the altar. The portraits were stacked above the bookshelf. The incense in the same drawer as the lighter, their holders in the glass cabinet with my high school math trophies. I lined the portraits along the dining table, lit the incense, and threw a couch cushion on the floor.