“What about her daughter? Her grandchildren?”

“It’s yours, Mr. Frazier,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t think the daughter wants anything to do with it at all.”

I shook my head. It did not seem possible but the lawyer assured me that it was true. I signed the documents and was instructed to visit the title company to complete the transfer. I did so with my wife and daughter present, after which the house and property atop the ridge, the old white Victorian in which the Wilson family had made their home and the twenty remaining acres that surrounded it, was officially transferred into my name.

AND SO IT IS HERE, in the late spring of 1983, that this story reaches its end. I have come to see what needs be done to the house and property, for my wife and I have decided to keep it, at least for now, and to use it as a summer getaway, a place in the country we can retire to when I am not teaching, to offer our daughter some version of those same childhood memories that I still hold dear. That my wife is pregnant again is another reason to hold the place in trust, for we are growing weary of the city. It could be that we move here permanently one day. This I do not yet know.

I have come to clean and repair and generally ready the house for the arrival of my wife and daughter and the baby yet to come, which really means that I have come here to write in this space while the contractor I have hired does what work needs doing: new siding to replace that which has rotted away, new roofing, new porch boards and a new rail, new steps off the back door. The original furniture remains in place, every stick of it, and I have taken some time here to go through the ­Wilsons’ papers—old receipts and the like, ephemera of the days in which this house held a business and a family all at once. At some point I will take the important papers to the county office in Auburn to see if some archivist there can make use of them. I do not think I will throw them out if the county can find no purpose in the documents, for there are photographs and maps and business papers going back before the turn of the century and they provide a history of this place, one that I cannot bear to see destroyed. In that stack of papers is a photograph of a young Japanese man next to a white farmer. It is unlabeled but I can only assume that I am looking at Homer Wilson and Hiro Takahashi, their faces bright in the sun of some summer long past.