WHEN I CAME HOME THE NEXT DAY, GRANDMA MELVYN WAS SLEEPING IN THE recliner beneath a crocheted afghan. I sat on the couch and stared at her, hoping she would wake up so we could work on something, but she snored away. I thought about shaking her arm or running around the room yelling “Zoysia attack!” but I didn’t know what would happen if I woke Grandma Melvyn. It had the potential to be dangerous—like when a startled sleepwalker goes crazy and murders some stranger on the sidewalk. I went to the kitchen table and pulled a pack of cards out of my backpack and practiced shuffling.

I split the deck into different-sized stacks and counted the cards in each stack. Then I closed my eyes and picked up each one without “squeezing the ink off it.” I concentrated on the thickness of each stack and how it felt in my hands. I tried to imprint the feel of each stack in my mind so I could remember it later. Twenty-seven cards feel like this. Fifteen cards feel like that. After a while, I reversed the process and tried to guess how many cards were in a stack just by feel. I was never right, but sometimes I was close. Once, I was just twelve off. Okay, so that’s not impressive, since there are only fifty-two cards to start with. I needed lots more practice.

I shuffled and reshuffled and reshuffled the cards. When I was done with that, I shuffled and reshuffled and reshuffled them all over again. And you know what? It was fun. I was focused like a laser and lost track of time until—cough!

I jumped out of the chair and turned around. Grandma Melvyn was standing there watching me shuffle. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but it might have been a long time. I looked at the clock. I’d been shuffling for almost two hours.

Without a word, Grandma Melvyn smiled slightly, nodded her head at me, and went back to the recliner. And you know what? Even though we had already been working together for almost a week, that was the moment when my magic lessons really started. I don’t mean that anything changed about what we did in lessons. The lessons were still weird, and I never knew what was going to happen. What was different was Grandma Melvyn. Before that moment, she didn’t seem to care if I got anything out of lessons or not.

After that moment, she got serious.