I wished I had thought to record the call, so I could play it back, slow it down, and see what I had missed. Maybe I would have been able to send the audio recording to grandmother and have her translate it for me.

Then my phone vibrated.

我们在铅笔厂旁边的公园见面

Even as I scrambled to copy the text into my translating app, she sent another message.

👵🏽↔️👩🏻 ✏️🏢🌳

🕐? I sent back.

👍

I had not even realized the emoji of the clock I sent had a time on it. Her eyes were sharp. I prepared my backpack, tucked grandmother’s pencil into the side pocket, then ran out the door to ensure I would catch the train and make it there by the emoji time.

She was already at the park near the old pencil company when I arrived, sitting on a bench. She held a cane in front of her that appeared less to support her weight than to hold her posture upright. Her expression was far sterner than grandmother’s.

“Hi,” I said, instinctively in English, running over.

“Monica?”

She said my name carefully, like porcelain on her lips.

“It’s really nice to meet you,” I said in Chinese. Meng smiled. Her teeth were small and crooked. So she did understand me.

She gestured to the open space beside her, and I sat down.

She said something I only partially understood. It was a question, asking if I did something. Then she pulled out a pencil. She pointed first to herself, then to the pencil, then to my wrist. She spoke her words again.

“Yes,” I said. I startled her with my excitement, understanding what she was trying to say. “I Reforged your pencil. Grandmother asked me to.”

She asked something else. This time, I could recognize the word for “grandmother.”

I took out grandmother’s pencil and handed it to her. She looked at it for a long time before taking it.

“She spent a lot of time writing with that,” I said. “She really wanted to find you again.”

She held the pencil in both hands, cradled in her lap.

“Her memory is fading now.” I had looked up how to explain her disease, practiced saying it. “And she had surgery on her hip.”

Meng did not say anything, so I kept talking.