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It always felt hot and hazy, coming off an 8-hour flight from Europe, and the backs of my legs would melt into our rental car’s leatherette seats on the drive from Logan Airport to my grandmother’s apartment in the outskirts of Boston But despite the fug inside my head, there was one thing I knew clearly from our previous visits: the gigantic tank we would pass on the highway As the car thudded rhythmically on the tarmac, the colossal gas holder, painted with a cheerful rainbow of brushstrokes, came into view, and my sister and I would search for the profile of Ho Chi Minh, which was said to be hidden somewhere in the design The game never lost its thrill and I knew that if only I could spot the threads of Ho’s straggly beard in the abstract stripes of colour, as I had been able to do on my previous visits, then I could follow them upwards to find his pert profile And there he was, on the edge of the blue streak, facing into the central band of red, with the name ‘Corita’ painted underneath   As a family, we were on our way to visit Alice Roach, my grandmother She was born in Boston in 1904 A devout Catholic, she wore her baby sister Florence’s caul in a pendant around her neck Irish lore held that the flap of skin that had covered Florence’s face when she was born gave her the gift of second sight, but she had died before the age of five When we arrived at the apartment, Grammy would spring up and pull a chicken potpie out of the oven, or slide a cylinder of sticky Boston brown bread out of its can to serve with franks and beans   Afterwards, the synthetic aroma of Andes crème de menthe thins wafted together with the illicit cigarettes she smoked in the broom closet Alice’s life had abruptly changed course when her husband died prematurely of heart disease and she had to raise her five daughters alone She trained as a physical therapist and worked well into