“That so?”

“Hai,” Hiro said. Then he repeated the word in English. “Yes. Lime sulfur better.”

“What’s your recipe?”

“Two-thirds to one-third,” Hiro said.

“Two-thirds being the sulfur.”

He nodded. “Ground like salt,” he said. “Very fine. For winter and maybe February.” This latter English word, February, was difficult to say and he felt his mouth slipping over the word as he struggled with it.

“Yeah,” the man said now, “for some reason I never got around to it. Jesus there’s just so much to keep ahold of. Maybe I can prune this back?”

“No pruning now,” Hiro said. “Too late.”

“Yeah I guess I know that too.” He paused and then said, “You’re . . . what? Chinese?” The man had been looking from Hiro to the fruit and back again but now he stopped and really looked at the man before him, a face deeply tan, eyes dark but sparkling, cheeks slightly drawn, not from privation but from, the young man thought, a kind of strength. He was taut as a bow. That much was clear just from looking at him.

“Japanese,” Hiro said. “Late for lime sulfur but maybe try. Paint on here and here and here.” He pointed to the trunks, their shapes unpainted, unmarked by the whitewash of the sulfur. “Start process.”

“Start what now?”

Hiro paused, thought hard about the English r sound, and then said carefully, “Process.”

“Ah yeah. Process,” the young man said. “Sorry.” Then he said his name: “Homer Wilson.”

“Hiroshi Takahashi.”

They shook hands, and for a moment Hiro stood there in the shade next to this man, this Homer Wilson. If he felt something of the magnetic pull that would draw the two families together he did not show it, and yet it had to be there, a pull of such force that it would draw them together even long after history had blown them apart.

At last Hiro nodded. “Have a nice day,” he said. Then he turned back to where he had left his wife and baby in the road.

“Ah wait wait,” the man said. “You working around here?”

Hiro told him for whom he had worked and that he was looking for something more permanent, somewhere he might stay, adding, after some discussion, that he had a new baby and that it was hard on his wife to be on the move all the time.

“Seems like you know about trees,” Homer said then.

“Yes,” Hiro answered. “Family orchard in Japan. Peaches and Kyoho.”

“What’s that?”

“Ah, grapes. Like . . . ah . . . Concord.”

The man nodded in a kind of low arc, as if he were scooping up a pail of water with his mind, the ears waving in the air like the empty husks of melons. “I could use some help,” he said now. “Maybe you can help me with your recipe. The lime sulfur, I mean.”

Hiro looked at him. “A job?”