“He’s the only one I have left at all,” she said then. “My husband’s gone. Heart failure, of all things, which is ironic since the man had the biggest heart of anyone I ever knew. You know, for a while I blamed Ray for that too.”

“How’s that?”

“I thought he sullied my daughter’s honor. That Ray did, I mean. It sounds so old-fashioned now. And when I went up to Seattle to take care of the problem—to have the problem taken care of, I mean—well, I don’t think my husband ever really forgave me for that.”

“He had to understand it though. Didn’t he?”

“I don’t know. Tak really was my husband’s best friend in all the world. I didn’t really think it was possible even back then. I mean I didn’t think it was possible that he could overlook the fact that Tak was Japanese. It just seemed like too much.”

“But don’t you have a son too?”

“Oh,” she said sadly, “that’d be Jimmy.”

I waited for her to say more but the church’s door had opened and Mrs. Takahashi appeared, the priest just behind her, the two of them turning toward each other and bowing slightly, saying something that I could not hear. Mrs. Takahashi stepped down to the gravel of the parking lot and then to the car.

“What’d he say, Kim?” Mrs. Wilson asked her as I moved to the driver’s seat once more.

Mrs. Takahashi did not answer until I had pulled the car out onto the road again. When at last she spoke, her voice was hardly audible at all. “He was here,” she said. “Raymond was here.”

“He remembered that?” Mrs. Wilson said.

“He remembered my family. And he remembered my husband coming to look for Raymond.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said that Raymond arrived soon after my husband did. Days or weeks. And Raymond told the priest that he’d already been home. The priest was satisfied. So that was the end of his concern.”

It had been the same everywhere then, Raymond’s invisible presence in Placer County being predicated on simple trust. He said he had been home—home, that is, to Oakland—and this was taken as fact and no further thought was given to contacting his family.

“I’m sorry, Kim,” Mrs. Wilson said.

“He slept here.”

“Every night?” I asked.

“Almost every night,” she said. “That’s what he told me.”

It was silent in the car for a time. I kept waiting for either of them to comment on what was, at least to me, the obvious question, but when neither of them spoke again, I finally asked it: “Where was he those other nights?”

“What do you mean?” Mrs. Wilson said from beside me.

“The priest said he slept there almost every night. So where did he sleep when he wasn’t at the church?”