Auntie Men’s daughters grunt but before they can say anything Grandma Lanh pulls the whip from her knock-off Chanel handbag. “I can take care of this,” she says. “Buddha always listens to me.”

Tracy turns her head and cries. “We do not need you or your magic,” she says and then she looks at me. “Get your grandmother out of here!”

When Grandma Lanh first learned that I had switched sides, she cursed the Catholics for religious robbery because of who she believed I was — a Buddhist immortal, a child helper to the Goddess of Mercy, the one who came to help the needy, the one to do Buddha’s work. “That is why you were so special, why as a child you could expel demons, heal the sick, and save the dying. A child of Buddha,” she said, “like me.”

I have no memory of such things. My earliest recollection of anything miraculous or divine comes from my Jesus days, but I never tell Grandma Lanh this. She would ask why I’ve chosen to stay with the weaker religion. She would entice me to return, to reclaim my original Buddhist powers — because she would assume that I would want them back.

Auntie Men is covered in a foundation and blush that are better suited to a white person. She needs a bronzer and a light peach blush. I imagine it can’t be easy, the work of a mortician. Everything is always a rush. Her dress, an ankle-length, royal blue sequin gown, is the same one she wore on cruises — her favorite because it sparkles. For shoes, she wears a pair of metallic silver open-toe heels. They are samples that Candice, her youngest and also a buyer for Macy’s, had brought home for her years earlier. Auntie Men loved free things. Free pretty things. 

A red wrap, like a jersey bath towel, covers her head. The girls chose this over a wig because they wanted their mother to look as closely to the way she did during her final months alive.