Jess threw the three of bamboo at twenty to eleven, and Grace laid her hand down on it. Her jade bangle clicked against the last tile as she squared the row. Bamboo all the way across.
“Again,” Jess said, and unzipped the frog.
It was a green vinyl coin purse with a zipper for a mouth, and Jess counted quarters out of it onto the felt in stacks of four, laughing at it as though it had thrown the tile. Discarder paid, by the rule Ah Ma had set in 1994, when she bought the set from a church sale and taught her children on this table. Grace’s brother slid his empty glass toward the sink and stretched.
Ah Ma took the pencil stub out of the tin and licked the point. The underside of the lid was ruled into four columns, one for each chair, with a mark in the column of whoever finished a Sunday ahead. Grace’s column ran down to the rim and started back up the side. Jess’s column began last winter and held one mark, from a night in March when she had drawn her winning tile off the wall and screamed loud enough to bring the neighbor’s porch light on.
Then the wash. Ah Ma’s hands went into the tiles first, and the rest of them followed, a hundred and forty-four tiles face-down under eight palms, and it sounded like gravel poured on a counter. Grace had heard it every Sunday for thirty years. She could count a wall while it was still being built.
On Thursday Jess texted that work had her on Sunday. Sorry sorry. Save my seat.
The next Thursday it was the same text with one sorry.
The Sunday after that the three of them sat down at the felt anyway. Ah Ma tipped the tiles out and washed them by herself, out of habit, and nobody built a wall. Grace’s brother said they could play three-handed; he had seen it done in Flushing.
Ah Ma put the pencil back in the tin. “Three is a different game.”
So on Tuesday Grace drove the tin to Morrisville. Jess had two rooms over a nail salon and a card table she had to wipe down first. Grace set it up the way Ah Ma had set it up for her.
“Watch what they throw early,” Grace said. “Whatever goes out first, nobody at the table needs. Whatever stays in, somebody’s holding for.”
Jess learned faster than anyone Grace had taught. By nine she was calling out discards before Grace turned them over, and she won two practice hands in a row, one of them off the wall, and she laughed and made Grace pay up.
“Come Sunday,” Grace said. “You’d give me trouble now.”
“When things calm down, Auntie.” Jess zipped the frog. “Work’s crazy.”
Grace drew. The bangle clicked on the tile, and she turned it over already knowing it: red dragon, the last of four, which she had placed when the wall was half built. Jess had won two hands tonight at a card table where the quarters went back and forth. Every Sunday in the lid Grace had counted the same way, before the wash was done, and she had counted Jess along with the tiles.
She discarded the dragon. Jess didn’t claim it.
Grace let herself into Ah Ma’s kitchen on Wednesday while her mother slept, and turned the lid over under the light over the stove. Thirty years of marks. She took the pencil stub from the tin, licked the point the way her mother did, and under the last line of the tally she wrote a new house rule in her own hand.
Grace wins off the wall or not at all.
She took a picture of the lid with her phone and sent it to Jess with no message.
On Sunday the wash had four pairs of hands in it.