“I’m all right, babydoll,” I told her, but she climbed into my lap nonetheless and held my head in her tiny hands and rocked me and told me everything would be all right, as I had said to her dozens of times before.

I went there for the funeral, my first time in Newcastle since 1971, and stood around as people I did not know talked about her, and when a woman nearing sixty approached me after the service and asked if I was John Frazier, it took me a moment to place the name that she gave me in response. It was Helen, the daughter who had become so estranged from her mother that in 1969 they had not been in communication at all. She looked not unlike her mother had those years before, perhaps heavier but otherwise it would not have been difficult to identify her and I marveled at my own inability to do so. In the years that had followed I had not thought much of Helen Wilson, the daughter, the mother who had also lost her child, and I longed to ask her if she had reconciled with her own mother in the end and if she had learned what had become of her son, Franklin Yamada, but after handing me a business card she turned and walked away, the look on her face an inscrutable mask. I had seen just that expression from her mother and knew it would be foolish to press her.

“She seems pleasant,” my wife said next to me.

“She just buried her mother,” I told her.

“Oh jeez,” my wife said. “I didn’t know that was the daughter. You might have introduced us.”

“I didn’t know her,” I said. “I’ve never seen her before.”

“What’s the card?”

I handed it to her and she read it aloud, the name of a law office in Auburn, and although I did not know or understand what it might have meant, my wife, smarter than I am in almost every way, said, “She left you something.”

“What do you mean?”

“In her will. She left you something.”

“No way,” I said.

“I’ll bet you a million dollars,” my wife said.

MY WIFE, OF COURSE, WAS RIGHT. Stepping up to the lawyer’s office I thought I would receive some kind of document of confession, that somehow Evelyn Wilson might have known the whole story of Ray Takahashi’s disappearance and would only now, finally, reveal it to me, the last survivor of those days in which we searched for his whereabouts to no avail. But I was not handed any cryptic sealed envelope but instead was instructed to sit in the lawyer’s unkempt office and was read the pertinent part of the last will and testament of Evelyn Florence Wilson. When the lawyer was done he looked up at me.

“I don’t understand,” I told him.

“What’s not to understand?”