When I rang the bell of the house a young cousin greeted me and led me inside. My two aunts were busy back in the kitchen making final preparations for dinner. As we sat down in the living room I saw a flash of color and movement from the adjacent room, but before I could say anything my aunts came out, both wiping their hands on their aprons. We all hugged each other, then my younger aunt asked her son where Halmoni was. He wasn't sure, and though I could have said something then, I didn't, again: if she didn't feel like coming out right at that moment, I wasn't going to push her. We sat down once more and had a cold drink, but after a moment my aunts had to go back to the kitchen and while I awaited the arrival of my uncles I craned my head and peered into the sitting room, to see Halmoni crouched in the corner running a brush through her hair. She was always a very modest woman, hard-working and physically tough (her hands were unscaldable, and she preferred to sleep on the bare ondol floor, without even a pillow), but I would say she was marked by a weakness for a fetching outfit or new cosmetic—a surprising and thus thoroughly charming note of girlish vanity.

My cousin said he'd go look for our grandmother upstairs (though I couldn't imagine how she could have gotten up there), when Halmoni cleared her throat, effectively announcing herself. She came in, not crawling at all but walking with slowed, careful steps, her hunched back bent down almost to 90 degrees. She had donned a pink sweater with decorative white floral stitching, and though she wore no lipstick or face powder, she seemed amazingly unaged since I'd seen her last, maybe even younger, prompting the hopeful boy in me to think that she was actually getting stronger with time, that she'd be here indefinitely.

She wrapped her arms around me, her face pressed into my chest, hardly taller now with her fallen posture than my six-year-old daughter. I could smell the faint almondy oiliness of her hair. And as much as I didn't want to think of her as frail, she most clearly was, her hold of me like the cling of someone straining to grab on more than to hug. Soon enough, we were sitting together on the sofa, her hands cupping mine, gently kneading them just as she had often done to my sister and me as children and to our mother before her end.

"It's too far for you to come," she said. "It's good you didn't try to bring your family. You yourself shouldn't have bothered."

"It's no bother."

My cousin piped in, "Halmoni, he came over to see you, you know."

"Even more reason," she said, though half-smiling. She asked earnestly, "Are you tired?"

"I'm fine."

"You must be hungry."

"Not so much."

She called out to the kitchen, telling her daughters that I needed to eat right away. My younger aunt came out and said she could set the table, that we didn't have to wait for the men to arrive (which was of course possible, though an impossibility).

"Really," I told her. "I want to wait."

She nodded and went back to the kitchen. Halmoni made a raspy sound in her throat at me, a distinctive Korean mother-style scold, the sound of which contains just the pitch to make one feel at once guilty and beloved.

"Are you feeling well these days?" I asked, having practiced the phrase on the subway ride.

"Sometimes I have a little trouble with my back. But not today. Your father is in good health?"

"Yes."

"You visit him regularly?"

"I try to."

"You must do so always," she said, tapping my hand for emphasis. "Keep the family together." She paused. "And your stepmother, she is well, too?"

"Yes."

Halmoni nodded, a different sound coming from her throat, the barest exhalation.

"That's good," she said. "It's how it should be."

She was staring right into my eyes, gazing, I'm sure, at the remnants of her first child, the only one, with any mercy, who would precede her to the grave. I pictured my mother's black granite headstone back in New York, and then, too, my paternal grandfather's stone, and then Halmoni's and my father's and even my own, all the written names, cast wide.

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