He had thought, imagined, that it would be Jimmy or Mr. Wilson or even Helen who came to the door. He had not anticipated Mrs. Wilson—Evelyn was her name but Ray had only ever called her Mrs. Wilson—and so he was brought up short. Seeing her there—her thin frame, light brown hair, aquiline features, skin gone olive from the long days of summer—was still less surprising than the expression on her face, at once hard and confused and filled with some mixture of grief and rage, emotions that passed over her face as if patterns of weather, clouds of different altitude and color and consistency and threat, fog and rain and hail and high winds, so that Ray took a moment even saying her name, at last managing the four syllables, “Mrs. Wilson,” and then paused as she stared at him, goggle-eyed, before adding, at last: “Is Mr. Wilson at home?”

“You,” she said simply.

“It’s me, Mrs. Wilson,” he said, nodding. “It’s Ray. Ray Takahashi.”

“Ray Takahashi,” she said quietly, still staring at him, her eyes flashing with an emotion he still did not recognize.

And so what he determined was that somehow, just as he could not identify the expression on her face, he too must have remained unrecognized or unrecognizable to her, his short hair and uniform making him into a foreigner. “I was in the army,” he said. He pulled his hat down from his shorn head now, holding the olive cloth in both hands before him as if something fragile. “I fought the Nazis in Europe.”

“The Nazis?” she said. This a clear question.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ray told her. “I just wanted to speak with Mr. Wilson. Oh, and you too of course. Are Jimmy and Helen at home?”

When she spoke at last her voice was one that Ray had never heard before, not from her or anyone: a low breathy sound as if she were just on the edge of running out of air. “You get away from me,” she hissed.

He stood silent in the face of it, mouth open, hat still clenched in one hand, thumbs at the seams of his trousers.

“You get off my porch,” she said now, the volume rising even as her voice trembled. “Go on! Get off my porch!”

“Mrs. Wilson?” He stepped backward as she advanced.

“I don’t want you coming near this family. Do you hear me? Do you?”

“I don’t understand.”