“I try to imagine his life,” Ruth says. “But I never can.” Then she says, “Oh! Wait here, I left a key.” She goes back in. He is staring at the fish. She walks straight toward him. “You bastard. I will never forgive you for this. I can forgive you all your other things. Your rudeness. Your lying around feeling sorry for yourself. But you pull yourself together and treat your daughter like a human being! Here is something back in place. Where’s your heart? Where is your soul?” She slams the door as she leaves.

Lin hears it and thinks, Wow! This is the second time. What a door-slammer.

When she comes back out to Lin, she says, “He’s not a bad person, I promise, but he’s been like this since he came back. It’s been worse since our son died.”

“Your son?”

“We were married once. My son was older than you. Your brother, Marco, was from before the war.”

Before and after, those were words that described people on both sides of the water.

“Your father was my husband then.”

Lin doesn’t ask what happened. Ruth doesn’t tell. She takes the girl back to her mother’s house.

“So,” says Aurora. “You are already back. He was himself, I take it.” They sit at the table where women have always sat together and shared more than food and that night they have a beer, even Aurora, and they cry with her.

Lin’s expectations and hopes are gone.

“No. He’ll come through. He just needs time.”

He, Thomas, is all that Lin has left from before.

That night Lin is awake in a bed in a foreign country. She remembers one night when her flower-shop mother lay down beside her and pulled her close with one arm and softly began to cry into Lin’s hair and how she felt loved and cared for.

Old Mother still makes baskets, as does Ruth, who has won awards for her dogbane and grass baskets. “Ruth still has a lot to learn,” the old woman, Aurora, tells the girl. She forgets Ruth’s hair is turning gray. “But she’s come a long way.” She doesn’t mention that the men stole Ruth’s baskets off the boat. “Oh, my, I’m rambling on. But here, look at this basket.” She goes to the sink and puts water in it. “It doesn’t even leak. There’s a story of a woman who made a small fishing boat for her husband by weaving it. He was safe in it, safer than in wood. But the other men were jealous and they set fire to it.”

Old Mother, Aurora, takes care of herself, but gets confused. She forgets last week. Like Ruth, Lin soon helps remind her of things.

“You won fifteen dollars last night at Bingo,” Lin tells her. “Here, let me fix your hair.” Lin takes off Old Mother’s glasses and washes them for her. She arranges her soft white hair in a beautiful style, a French twist, but soft at the face.