“Like Ray,” I said.

And now she looked at me and the expression that passed over her face was like a thousand clouds at once. The youth I had seen before was gone now and in its place stood every moment of her sixty-nine years, a woman who was, I realized, broken by all the decisions she had ever made.

“Come on,” I told her. “It’s getting late.”

“John.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

FOR THE REST OF THAT SUMMER I returned to the relative mundanity of my days before Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Takahashi had entered my life. I thought often of calling Ray’s mother to tell her what I had learned, but each time something held me back, not a sense of loyalty to family or to race but perhaps simply the knowledge that what I had learned did not amount to much at all. He had been run off the property and did not return. Still, I wondered why Mrs. Wilson had chosen to tell me, to tell anyone at all, since she had very nearly gotten through Mrs. Takahashi’s visits without any of it being known. And really what did it matter now that she had told me? Was it such a great secret in the end? After all of it, no one really knew what happened to Raymond Takahashi and yet Mrs. Wilson had even kept what little she had known a secret, allowing the boy’s mother to make the drive not once or twice but six times in all, allowing her to trace the ghosts of a history that was obfuscated by Mrs. Wilson herself. Help me, Evelyn, Mrs. Takahashi had said. Perhaps it was simply loneliness, that she might have clung to Mrs. Takahashi in the emptiness of her final decades, their lives inexplicably re-entwined amidst the ghosts of a past the repercussions of which continued to reverberate well into whatever future was yet to come.

And so I returned to my work at the gas station, and when classes started at the nearby community college I spoke to a counselor and signed up for a general education course in math and another in creative writing. I sat uncomfortably at the back of the room, listening to the professors drone on and watching the door.

In the evenings I would sit out on the back porch, smoking and staring at the still-unkempt patch of lawn and the twisted black shape of the wild plum, a survivor, I imagined, from some orchard that might well have been tended and cared for in the days before the war. It was there, in the shortening days of late September, when I began to wonder about my friend Chiggers again. Perhaps I thought to call him because I now knew more of the story I had begun to tell him on the same porch when the summer was young and the days moved toward their own vigor. It was not my story, it never had been, and even so, my part in it was over. Ray Takahashi would forever be lost amidst the golden grasses and blue oaks and cold clear streams.