Mrs. Takahashi’s death in 1981 brought me to San Jose once more. My wife had put her on our Christmas card list—my wife was attuned to such things—and this had put us in some regular contact, enough so that one of her daughters had sent us the notice of her passing. After the funeral, I visited Mary and Doris, the two grown Takahashi daughters, although neither of their last names were Takahashi then and had not been for many years. I told them some about the summer of 1969 when their mother and my aunt had traversed the county looking for clues as to their elder brother’s disappearance. He would have been—should have been—fifty-eight years old on the year of his mother’s death and part of me still wondered if he was out there somewhere, walking the hills of some other land, resting under the shadows of some other trees. Mary told me of seeing Ray and Helen kissing on the day the buses came, their young bodies clasped to each other under the shade of the fruit sheds. “He had a little something from her,” Doris remembered.

“What do you mean?”

“A little locket or something. He used to fidget with it all the time when he thought we weren’t looking.”

“He thought we were two blind little kids,” Mary said.

“But we knew everything, didn’t we?” Doris said, smiling.

“We sure did,” Mary said.

But not everything, I thought.

AS FOR EVELYN WILSON, I did not hear much from her in the years that followed the end of this narrative. She never met my wife nor my children, although I did discover after her death that she had every one of my novels and clippings of some of my stories and essays too. I thought that she might well have been keeping track of my writing just to make sure she did not appear in those public pages. Until the appearance of this book, she would have been quite satisfied.

News of Mrs. Wilson’s passing came during a phone call from my mother not so very long after Mrs. Takahashi’s funeral. Just after her greeting, my mother asked if I remembered Evelyn Wilson “up there near Auburn,” and I already knew what was coming. My grandmother’s death had felt like a physical blow, and Mrs. Takahashi’s had not been particularly different, but Mrs. Wilson’s, much to my surprise, was the worst of all, and a hard heaviness flooded over me at the news. My daughter, six years old then, found me sitting on the kitchen floor near the phone, my head in my hands. “Daddy,” she said, “are you hurt? Do you need a Band-Aid?”