Today is the second day of the three-day Buddhist service at the National Funeral Home in Merrifield, Virginia, a twenty-minute drive from Grandma Lahn’s Section 8 apartment complex. These days in order to get anywhere, Grandma Lanh has to call around for rides. Just yesterday she gave one of my cousins twenty dollars for coming by and this morning she offers me the same.

When I decline, she returns the bill inside her pajama waistband. “At first I thought you were the medical shuttle guy,” she says. “Of course, he usually comes at four-thirty in the morning to take me to dialysis treatment, so this would be late. He’s never late.” She pauses and looks out the window. “I woke up early to get ready, you know. Three o’clock.” She raises three fingers, starting with the middle and ending with the pinky. “At my age, I need a lot of time to get ready.” She frowns and pushes out her under-bite.            

“Are they all at the funeral home right now? ” she asks.

I look stupidly at the floor.

“That’s okay,” she says. “At least I still have the shuttle guy. Every time I get into the van, he says, ‘Good morning, Mrs. Tran! How are you doing, Mrs. Tran?’ Very polite young man. Mexican. Most times I just wave. If I say anything he’ll think I speak English.”

Although Grandma Lanh insists that we speak Vietnamese to her, the family suspects she’s more proficient in English than she lets on. Years ago, she studied for her U.S. citizenship test and learned a few words for the interview portion, mostly names of U.S. presidents. For weeks, she marveled at how Lincoln managed to end slavery. “Emancipation proclamation,” she repeated, and even speculated that he was Buddhist.       

“Three o’clock? You must go to sleep pretty early then.”

“Five in the evening.” She pauses for a few seconds to see if I react. “At my age, you don’t sleep normal time. Around eleven at night, I wake up, go to the bathroom, get back to my hammock and watch Chinese soap opera on video. Your grandfather, right before he died, slept only three hours a day, too. The rest of the time, he just complained — moaning mostly, and always waving his arms around.”