I do not know how many people I am responsible for killing in Vietnam, which is a clever way of saying I do not know how many people I killed. I had been in the country for a year as part of an invading army and the only Vietnamese person I could recall with any detail was a Saigon prostitute I—and Chiggers—called by her working name: Daisy. And yet I had killed and killed and killed and each of them had mothers and fathers and grandparents and some had been children and all had been loved and named and loved again. And I radioed and the Phantoms came and they brought napalm and white phosphorus and Sidewinders and Zunis and all the rest and those people, loved and named, became pillars of ash washed away by the monsoon rain.

When Mrs. Takahashi finally appeared she held a folded sheet of paper in one hand and she set it upon the sideboard before crossing her arms and nodding briefly. “I have more,” she said. “My husband likes tamales too. There are some in the freezer.”

“I’m stuffed,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Good tamales,” she said. “At least he thinks so.”

“He’s really gone nuts for Mexican?”

“Every day,” she said. “It’s all he’ll eat now. If I make anything else he complains.”

“You make them from scratch?”

“Not the tamales. They come from a market across town. He’s picky.”

“Is he?”

“About the tamales. Not so much about anything else.”

There was, between us, a moment of silence then, the afternoon’s gray rain spattering the house, but within there were no sounds but those of the room itself, our breath on the air, the ticking of the clock. “I’m sorry,” I said to her.

“You don’t need to be sorry,” she said. “You needed help. And we’re friends.”

“I’m a bad person.”

“Why?”

I shook my head. “I don’t even know where to start. You know I was in Vietnam.”

“That was war, John.”

“No,” I said roughly. “I mean yes, but no.”

“You have to forgive yourself.”

“How?”

“It’s past,” she said simply.

“But what am I supposed to do?”

She looked at me. “You’re supposed to live,” she said. “That’s all. Just live.”

Mrs. Takahashi lifted the sheet of paper from the sideboard and slid it before me on the kitchen table. I asked her what it was before I even looked at it but she did not answer, not at first, allowing me a moment to take in what was, I realized, a copy of a telegram.

“Would you take this to Mrs. Wilson for me?” Mrs. ­Takahashi said after a time. “I had them make an extra copy. I was going to mail it to her.”

“What is it?”

“It’s him. Franklin R. Yamada,” she said.

“Who?” But even in saying this single syllable I understood who she meant.