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.

Chiggers had written his phone number on a scrap of paper and I had come across it a few days earlier next to my typewriter, an artifact which was finally getting some use once more now that I was in school. One cool cloudy night in early fall, after my grandmother had stuck her head outside to tell me that she was going to bed, I determined it was time for me to contact my old friend. I waited outside until I thought my grandmother likely asleep, then I stubbed out my cigarette and reentered the darkening interior of the house, dialing those scrawled digits and then leaning against the wall as that distant telephone in San Diego began to ring.

The woman who answered sounded, even in her one-word greeting, exhausted and I worried for a moment that I had called too late at night. I did not even know what time it was. Surely not far past eight. “Uh, hello,” I mumbled in response to her voice. “This is . . . uh . . . this is John Frazier. I’m a friend of Chiggers’.”

“Who?” the woman said.

“Chig—” I began, stopped, said, “Shoot,” and then realized with a start that I could not remember his real name. “I’m his friend from Vietnam. I’m sorry, we called him Chiggers. My name’s John. He called me Flip.”

“Oh Flip, sí,” she said. And then the name: “Hector.”

“Hector, right right,” I said. “This is his mother?”

“Claro que sí.”

“I’m sorry to call so late.”

“Not so late.”

I thought she would tell me to wait then, that she would go find Chiggers or that he was out, but she lapsed into silence again and so I said, finally, “Is he around? Can I speak with him?”