“You think I was wrong?”

I looked up at her. “I’m sure you did what you thought best.”

“Thank you, John,” she said.

She looked away now, her eyes out past me toward the window that faced the street, eyes so startlingly blue that they appeared as if chips of ice.

“What happened next?” I said.

“Next?”

“In the car you said that you had to do something after Helen saw him here. So what was it? What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything any mother wouldn’t have done.”

“What did you do?”

In the muted light of the diner I could almost see the woman she had been at thirty or twenty or even the girl she had been before that, the years stripped away and the ghost of her former self just beyond the light of those years, when the future had been yet open and the stakes controlled by choices never as dire as those to come after.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I did,” she said at last, her spine seeming to straighten at the words, her neck and head elevating. “I did what my daughter asked me to do. And she was right to ask me. I had my husband pay some of the men to chase him off. He left me no choice.”

“Who did it?”

“Just some men who worked for us on the property. Migrants. They left at the end of the picking. What does it matter who they were?”

“What happened?”

“Well, he left, didn’t he?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“You’ll have children of your own one day. Then you’ll understand. You’d do anything for your children. Anything.”

For all the years that followed that evening I have wished that I would have said something of value in that moment, something which might have served to lay bare all the truths and lies we had been snaking through during the blazing heat of that summer, something that would make sense of it, or even something more banal, a curse of anger or of despair, a damnation leveled at this woman whose deceit had blown apart not only her own family but Ray Takahashi’s family as well. But no words came, and in the end I only sat there, staring down at my empty dinner plate, my sweating water glass.

“She was so young. And I didn’t know what she’d do if she saw him again. I was afraid she’d fall right back into his arms. I don’t expect you to understand but I thought Helen would, maybe not at first but certainly after she had her own children. I thought she’d understand then at least.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Had you asked me that a few months ago I might have said no. Now I’m just not sure. It’s a strange feeling to have no family. I don’t even know where my daughter lives anymore. Last time I wrote her the letter was returned. Not at this address. Phone disconnected or changed. No forwarding number. Not in the phone book. It’s like she just disappeared.”