RAY TAKAHASHI HAD BEEN in Placer County for nearly six weeks when he stepped into that diner. He had been to the ­Wilsons’ property four or five times in that period, although during all but the first two instances he had been held back at the property line, for Mr. Wilson had hired a group of local pickers (Mrs. Wilson, actually, although it had been Mr. ­Wilson who paid them) to stand at the road and ensure that he came no farther than the ditch. Undoubtedly they had called him all variety of slurs, racial and otherwise, but he never rose to whatever challenge they offered, holding back along the gravel of the roadway in his increasingly dusty uniform, hot and sweating in the lengthening summer sun. Perhaps he also came under the darkness of moonlight, skating in under the trees and watching the house, looking up at the windows for any trace of Jimmy or Helen, Jimmy’s always dark but seeing light in Helen’s and perhaps even her shape there. Perhaps too he wandered in that same darkness to the house in which he had spent all his life until the buses and the war—that small whitewashed house, in need of repairs and fresh paint now as it never had been when his own family had lived there. That house was filled with light and the shapes of its new residents, from Oklahoma and whose names he did not even know. Perhaps one of the men who had taunted him from the road was husband to the woman he had seen when he had first arrived and had stood in front of that house, for the men who guarded the Wilsons’ driveway were not men whom Ray knew but were from elsewhere, in town only for the summer months, for the picking and processing, and then would scatter southward into fields of apples and grapefruit and oranges.

He would not have entered the diner had he not seen her through the front window, and for a long while he could only stand on the sidewalk, peering into the darkness, at first unbelieving and then realizing that yes it was her, it was Helen, at long last. There she was, seated across the room with a young man Ray did not know and hardly noticed at all.