For the rest of that week, the men painted the tree trunks, working side by side and finding that there was a rhythm in the work, an ease that neither had expected. Hiro had labored, already, for a half dozen men on as many farms and had learned that employers were varying in their dispositions, some kindly and distant, some ever on the lookout for an imperceptible transgression, even when it was clear that most of the ­Japanese laborers, some as young as twelve years old, knew more about managing fruit and vegetable production than did the pale, grim owners. But it felt different here. This American, this Homer Wilson, wanted to learn, wanted to know what Hiro knew, and treated him as a kind of equal, even one night inviting the Takahashis into his home, an invitation which cemented the feelings Hiro already held for Homer Wilson, that he had found a friend.

That his wife and Homer’s wife did not find themselves quite so well matched was nothing either of the men even considered. During those first weeks the two women did not exchange more than a few words, and in fact their interactions were so tenuous and guarded that it would take many years of proximity before the sum total of their conversations would fill a single page. It was not simply reticence; Kimiko was concerned about her lack of aptitude in the English language to such an extent that the vocabulary itself seemed to drain away from her each time she reached for it. Only when her two daughters spoke that language around her in a constant and unceasing flow did she finally come to feel she understood something of its logic and texture. But that was so much later, after Tule Lake and Jerome and Oakland, after the family had settled in San Jose and their lives had changed forever. As for Evelyn Wilson, she simply lacked the trust and patience and grace to help her young neighbor muddle through the basics of a new language. And yet there was, or might have been in those early days, a feeling between them that they might yet seek friendship, their minds independently searching for something to say and neither saying anything at all.