“My grandson,” she said, and in response my voice emitted a sound that was part exhale and part moan.

MR AND MRS ROBERT F YAMADA, DONT PHONE DONT DELIVER BETWEEN 10PM AND 6AM REPORT DELIVERY

8722 WILLIAMS DR SEATTLE WA

THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY HAS ASKED ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR SON, RIFLEMAN FRANKLIN R. YAMADA DIED IN VIETNAM ON 28 MARCH 1968, FROM WOUND RECEIVED WHILE ON COMBAT OPERATION.

PLEASE ACCEPT MY DEEPEST SYMPATHY. THIS CONFIRMS PERSONAL NOTICIATION MADE BY A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY

KENNETH G WICKHAM MAJOR GENERAL USA F59 THE ADJUTANT GENERAL (17).

“He died in Vietnam?”

“Yes,” she said.

“God not even . . . a year?—year and a half?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure this is him? Couldn’t it be a mistake?”

“This is him, John,” she said. “My grandson’s name was Franklin. Sounds funny to me. Franklin. I don’t think Ray would have named him that. Do you?” Her tone was plain but there was, I thought, an edge somewhere beneath.

“How did you find him?”

“My husband called his lawyer friend and his lawyer friend called a private investigator. He tracked it down from what Evelyn left.”

“She left something?” But then I remembered that day when she had placed that single sheet of paper upon the coffee table in the living room, when she had said that this was all she knew.

“The birth certificate,” Mrs. Takahashi said. “So we knew the date and location and they figured out the rest. I don’t know how. It doesn’t really matter anymore.”

“Yamada,” I said. “That’s a Japanese name?”

She did not say anything now, only staring down at the little sheet of paper on the tabletop.

“God, Mrs. Takahashi,” I said then. “There’s something I need to tell you,” for the thought of it, that I harbored this last piece of information, the piece that my aunt had told me and for which she had sworn me to secrecy, that piece I could hold in secret no longer and so I told her, in one long gasping monologue, about that moment in the diner in Auburn and about how Evelyn Wilson—at Helen’s behest—had hired some fruit pickers to chase Ray out of the county, how Mrs. Wilson had been, all those weeks, not an ally at all but a kind of enemy.

Mrs. Takahashi raised her palm. “I already know,” she said.

I sat staring at her, goggle-eyed. “But how? She told me no one else knew.”

“I knew she wasn’t telling me the truth,” Mrs. Takahashi said. “Or not all of it. So I came back three or four times and asked around myself. I found someone who worked for her back then, when he was a boy. Bishop was his name. He remembered my Raymond in his uniform. He—he liked him. He told me my son was a hero.”