Chapter 3

For the first three days after Grandma moved in, the house had a long-lost, almost forced sense of warmth and harmony.

Grandma behaved with extreme meekness and restraint.

At meals, she always picked out the cheapest vegetables. When Elisa put a piece of braised pork on her plate, she would refuse for the longest time, sighing over and over, "Oh dear, why should an old woman with one foot in the grave eat so well? What a waste of food. You young people work so hard, eat more, eat more."

Watching Grandma look so cautious and put-upon, Ida's heart ached and she kept tearing up. Elisa's father also felt the old lady had really had it rough, and treated her with even more courtesy.

Elisa even posted a photo to her social media of the whole family watching TV with Grandma from behind, with the caption: "Love can withstand any winter." That post got hundreds of likes, which enormously satisfied Elisa's moral vanity.

But this "honeymoon period" lasted less than a week.

At 4:30 a.m. on the fourth day, Elisa was jolted out of her sleep by an extremely sharp clang of metal.

Clang! Bang!

The sound came from the kitchen, and in the dead silence of that early morning it was especially terrifying.

Elisa bolted upright in bed, her heart pounding, thinking a thief had broken in.

She threw on a coat, quietly opened her door, and saw the living room lights blazing.

In the kitchen, eighty-three-year-old Grandma was leaning on her cane, holding a stainless steel soup pot in one hand while trying to reach the noodles on the top shelf of the cupboard with the other. Because her hand was shaking, the pot lid dropped to the floor with a huge crash.

Hearing the commotion, Ida and Elisa's father came running out too, still half-dressed.

"Mom! What are you doing? Why aren't you asleep in the middle of the night?" Ida hurried over to pick up the pot lid and, her heart in her throat, steadied Grandma.

Grandma turned her head, her expression instantly turning utterly wronged and forlorn. She heaved a heavy sigh and said in a trembling voice, "I... I was hungry.

Back in the old house, I always got up around this time to cook porridge.

I was afraid of waking you all, so I thought I'd make myself something to eat... I'm old, useless now, even getting a bowl of noodles down causes trouble. Never mind, never mind, I won't eat, I'll just let these old bones starve."

And with that, Grandma actually flung down her cane and started toward the bedroom, bracing herself against the wall, looking as though she'd suffered some terrible injustice and was about to end it all.

Ida couldn't take that. She quickly grabbed the old lady, tears welling in her eyes. "Mom, don't say that! Just call me if you're hungry! I'll make you something right now!"

That morning the whole family got no more sleep.

Ida busied herself in the kitchen making Grandma a bowl of hot egg noodles. Grandma sat at the table eating and dabbing at her tears, muttering the whole time about what a burden she was.

Elisa watched from the side. Though it grated on her to be woken up, she finally pushed down her displeasure at the sight of Grandma's pitiful state.

But this was only the beginning of the nightmare.

From that day on, it was as if Grandma had set a special "body clock" in the house.

Every day, between four and five in the morning, she would get up right on schedule.

She no longer went to the kitchen for pots, but the way she made noise grew even more maddening.

She would drag her heavy feet, in those hard-soled old cloth shoes, pacing back and forth along the wooden-floored hallway with a dull "tap, tap, tap"; she would flush the toilet again and again, each flush like thunder in the silent night; she would even deliberately open the bedroom door and slam it shut, calling it "getting some fresh air."

Elisa already had frayed nerves, since she had to handle high-intensity operations data at the company all day.

After four or five days of this, Elisa nearly fell asleep during a meeting at work, and even miscalculated an important figure in her daze, getting torn into by the director in front of the whole team.

Elisa's father was an extremely mild-tempered high school teacher. He could see that his daughter and his wife were both being worn to the bone, so one weekend morning he gently raised the issue with Grandma.

"Mom, Ellie's under a lot of pressure at work, and Ida's blood pressure isn't good either. If you wake up early, do you think you could try to lie in bed a while, or move a little more quietly? This wooden floor carries sound terribly." His father's tone was already humble in the extreme, even with an ingratiating smile.

The moment the words were out, the atmosphere at the table froze solid.

Grandma's hand, holding her chopsticks, stopped in midair, and her eyes turned extremely strange in an instant—not anger, but an unfathomable, brooding grievance.

She slowly set down her chopsticks. She didn't argue, didn't make a scene. She simply lowered her head, and the tears fell like beads off a broken string, plink, plink, into the plain rice porridge in front of her.

"I understand... I understand..." Grandma murmured in a voice so tremulous it was heartbreaking. "A son-in-law is still just a son-in-law—there's always that barrier of blood between us. I live here, and even my breathing is an eyesore to you. I'll go... this afternoon I'll call the neighborhood association to send me off to a nursing home, or let me go beg on the streets. I'll never be a burden to your family of three."

This "retreat to advance" tactic was textbook-grade moral blackmail.

Elisa's father panicked on the spot, his face flushing red as he desperately tried to explain that he hadn't meant it that way. Ida was even more frantic—she dropped straight to her knees before her mother, crying, and slapped her husband, cursing him as a heartless wretch, how could he say such cruel things to an old woman past eighty.

Watching her father cover his face, his eyes full of swallowed grievance yet able only to bow his head and admit fault, and watching her mother dissolve into tears, Elisa stood in the bedroom doorway and felt a chill shoot from the soles of her feet straight to the crown of her head.

She suddenly realized that Grandma had no intention whatsoever of solving the problem; she was merely using an extremely vicious method to test and establish her absolute authority in this household.

The moment anyone dared to offer her even the faintest criticism, she would instantly transform into the most pitiful victim in the world, crushing the one who spoke up under an enormous weight of moral guilt.

In that moment, Elisa finally understood why her father's voice had trembled as he spoke.

Because in the face of an eighty-year-old woman who would never admit fault and would only play the weakling, you didn't even have the right to reason with her.