“Grandmother’s cousin’s.”

“Oh! I—I would need to look for it. I probably lost it though, I’m sorry to say.”

“That’s alright.” It was such a typical answer from him that I was not even disappointed. “But how did you find her in the first place?” I could not help asking.

“Oh. I met her in a mahjong hall. She’s a fiend.”

I smiled. “Of course she is.”

We talked for a little longer, mostly about logistics—when grandmother was coming home, when my spring semester was starting, what flights he should look into. And it was nice, to be able to speak to him normally, to begin to allow some of the old resentment to fade.

The next day, grandfather and I went to the hospital to take grandmother home. We rented the nicest car we could afford. Grandmother came out in a wheelchair. She will need it for a while. Grandfather insisted on tying a balloon to the arm even though the first thing we did, once grandmother was safely in the car, was collapse the chair and throw it in the trunk. But when we got home and opened the trunk, the balloon eagerly floated to attention, and grandmother laughed in delight. She was not totally present, but it was wonderful to see her happy, to see her at home.

I had a whole setup waiting in the living room, which we had converted into her bedroom. We helped her onto her bed, and I gave her an old tablet. I showed her how to navigate through the apps, as grandfather booted up his desktop. And once grandmother was set up, I grabbed my laptop, and we all signed in to the mahjong app. A mahjong LAN party.

We needed the app so that our fourth player could be the computer. But it took both grandmother and grandfather a while to understand how the game worked in a virtual setting, and it didn’t help that the rules were slightly different from the variant we played. The computer would play its tile immediately, but grandmother and grandfather played slowly, so different from their usual cavalier tossing of tiles. The patterns on the tiles were different than ours and grandfather had a hard time discerning the flower tiles from the wind tiles, and grandmother would pause for long periods. I would go over to help, explaining how to play a tile and reach for one a player threw out, but it never seemed to stick, and by the end I knew her whole hand.

We had a few good rounds, even if grandmother was never fully present.

“Maybe we try again another day,” grandfather suggested gently. Grandmother looked relieved when I took the tablet out of her hands.