The family is staying a couple of nights in my house while their new staircase treads are stained and sealed. It’s not a big family: My adult kid, their spouse, the six-year-old grandson, and an elderly cat. And my house is three stories tall, with four bedrooms, so the cat has his own room, the parents have theirs, and the grandchild already has a room in my house full of toys and books, with a bed. This is the first time since he was an infant that he has actually slept in the bed, though.

Normally, when the family comes over, he greets me casually and then goes up to his room, where we hear him reading aloud to himself, building things, and generally having a fine old time. I can’t provide what my grandmother did for me, which is many cousins around my age who would play with me, because he is the only child of an only child, but on the other hand he gets to take for granted that he has his own room in his grandmother’s house.

This time, he found a LEGO kit I put in his room, along with a graphic novel of the type that his parents probably wouldn’t buy for him; it has lots of noisy panels and silliness, and is a mildly bad influence because he quotes it and shows his parents pages of the protagonists beating one another up, but gentle transgression is part of my function as a grandparent. He read the novel over the delivery pizza, and then set to constructing the kit, and got half way through the 204 pieces before his father announced bedtime and took him upstairs for a shower and a long read-aloud, followed by bedtime.

He does not go to sleep right away. In fact, he doesn’t go to sleep for hours. This is not a function of being in a strange house; it’s how he rolls. He has never slept well. My kid never slept well, either. You learn, as a parent, to provide lots of books and get them used to making up stories on their own.

So it was a dream evening. I was in heaven, getting to be someone’s grandmother and having that person read the books I bought for him, play with the toys, and sleep in the bed.

The only problem with the dream is that I returned to who I was before my kid moved out: Someone who worries for no good reason. I sat downstairs reading, and periodically I would think, “What if he stops breathing? Is he going to smother under that duvet? Should I have moved the ibuprofen and the Tylenol out of the drawer in the bathroom where he can reach it? Will he lean against the window screen and fall into the back yard?” Periodically I would hear him raise his voice as he read or as he told himself a story in a funny voice, and the fear would subside, but with every quiet period the worry would rise slowly like the water level in a clogged sink.

A couple times, he came out of his room and stood on the landing like a ghost. The last time, I went upstairs and he looked at me without comprehension or words, and turned and went back into his room as if he was actually already asleep, just upright.

Eventually he fell silent. I looked in on him, and in the darkness he appeared to be okay, so I went to bed, and lay on my back with the bedroom door open, hoping that he would not awaken, walk downstairs, go out the front door, and wander the streets.

In the morning, I woke up and saw that his bedroom door was open, and he wasn’t there, so I tiptoed down the stairs and saw him reading his graphic novel, snuggled against his drowsing father on the living room sofa. I went back upstairs, relieved. Someone else had worried about him. Someone else was taking care of him. It didn’t have to be me.

That won’t stop me, mind you. My brain apparently thinks that’s my job when someone small is sleeping in my house. These things don’t turn off.