BooksBarbecue
Back Phantoms
Chapters (16)
  1. Title
  2. Chapter 1
  3. Chapter 2
  4. Chapter 3
  5. Chapter 4
  6. Chapter 5
  7. Chapter 6
  8. Chapter 7
  9. Chapter 8
  10. Chapter 9
  11. Chapter 10
  12. Chapter 11
  13. Chapter 12
  14. Chapter 13
  15. Acknowledgments
  16. Also by Christian Kiefer

The woman on the porch nodded. She was, I could see now, Mrs. Wilson’s age or close to it and was dressed more casually than my aunt, in a simple blouse and slacks, her black hair spun up about her head like cotton candy, a style almost identical to my aunt’s but for the absence of a head scarf.

For a moment I thought she might simply dismiss us by returning to the interior of that little house but at last she nodded. “Mrs. Wilson,” she said quietly, as if confirming to herself that this was who stood before her. “You had better come inside.”

Chapter 3

3

MY AUNT INTRODUCED THE WOMAN AS MRS. TAKAHASHI. I would come to understand only later just how entangled the two women were, a red thread tying together not only their own lives and their husbands’ lives and the lives of their children but pulling a taut line across history itself. And yet only in hindsight does it feel like fate, like providence, the initial connection between them, between their families, not brokered by the women at all but by their husbands and even that a kind of coincidence made meaningful only by our viewing it as a past event with everything else strewn out beyond it—all the pain and heartbreak and yes even death—so that the very coincidence of their meeting feels, in the end, less like coincidence and more like synchronicity. And yet how easily could Homer Wilson have kept his mouth closed in his frustration and, even if he did speak, how easily could Kimiko Takahashi have ignored those English words, instead continuing to walk behind her husband in the dust and slow heat of the afternoon.

I heard the story many years later, in the days after Mrs. Takahashi’s funeral when I sat with her adult daughters, Doris and Mary, and told them everything I had learned about their family and about my own, and they told me what I did not yet know, the story of that initial meeting under the shade of Homer Wilson’s failing peach trees, and not only that but the story too of the years that had come before, all the way back to Japan. That first story had come at some remove, the narrative of their lives in Newcastle only spoken in the house when they had been children, for the Wilsons were not discussed in the Takahashi home, not after Tule Lake and Jerome and Oakland and San Jose. That was a past, a betrayal, to be erased from their minds.