When we left that drugstore, Mrs. Takahashi was very quiet, her face utterly drained of color, haggard and exhausted and lined with a sense of profound disappointment. It seemed clear in that moment that she understood, finally and irrefutably, that she would never discover what had happened to her son, that he had appeared briefly amidst that small chain of little towns that ran up and down the railroad, he had walked the orchard rows one last time for five weeks or six weeks or more, and then had winked out of her life and likely out of existence for reasons she would never know.

“Is there anywhere else you’d like to go?” I asked her as the Pontiac’s hood flashed in the hot late afternoon sunlight.

“I’d like to go home now,” she said simply.

“All right,” I told her, and piloted the car back to my grandmother’s, where Mrs. Takahashi slipped out immediately, muttering a quick, plain, “Thank you,” and then closed the rear door.

Mrs. Wilson’s voice beside me, its tone absent, lilting: “She still thinks her boy’s some kind of hero.”

“He fought in the 442nd,” I said. “Doesn’t that qualify?”

“No,” she said firmly. “Don’t you know that he came back here to ruin me? Can’t you see that?”

“To ruin you? To ruin you? My God, he didn’t even know what was happening.”

“So why didn’t he just leave? It’s like he just couldn’t let it go. He just had to keep hounding us all.”

It was too much and I was angry now but before I could speak again, Mrs. Wilson said: “She had a boyfriend, you know. Not the man she married but they were serious. A local boy named Fisher.”

“Helen? You mean Helen had a boyfriend?”

“Of course I mean Helen. That thing with Ray wasn’t special. It was just a—just a—stupid—well, he seduced her is what it was. A sixteen-year-old girl. A child, really. God—he just wouldn’t leave. I mean he did eventually, obviously, but—it was like having a big spider hiding in the house somewhere and you never knew which cup it’d be under.”

“He just wanted a clear answer why you’d kicked his family out of their home. That’s all.”

“They were tenants, John,” she said sternly. “I’m not required to give them any answer at all.”

“They were more than tenants.”

If she heard this she did not acknowledge it, instead talking over me, saying things now that she should have said a month or more before, even twenty-seven years before. “It was that thing at the diner that brought it to a head. After that she would hardly speak to me at all. So you see I had to do something, didn’t I? As a mother, didn’t I have to do something?”