The two women had not been seen together for a long while and then, suddenly it seemed, there they were, side by side in the gravel. In my imagination I place them directly in front of the little house in which, in 1969, my grandmother resided, since that is where, I have been told, the buses were loaded. But of course they might have waited elsewhere along the edges of the town square. When I think of Mrs. Wilson now I think of a stern, aging beauty, a sixty-nine-year-old widow who had become, with the passing of years, increasingly severe and unforgiving, but then she was but forty-two, perhaps no longer young but certainly not the elderly woman I knew. Her manner, when described to me by those who had known her, was not one of tragic loss but instead manifested itself as a kind of physical bearing, as if she felt she was owed respect for some activity or action unknown or misunderstood. And this would be how she was to be remembered that summer, the summer of the removal: as somehow separate, apart, maybe even aloof, as if she had known this day had been coming and now she was simply there to watch it unfold.

She stood a full head taller than Kimiko and when she spoke, her voice, Evelyn’s, Mrs. Wilson’s—even those I spoke to who were her contemporaries would only ever call her Mrs. ­Wilson, just as they would never have called Kimiko ­Takahashi anything at all—was a clear bright sharp sound amidst the steady murmur of more distant voices and the occasional crunch of gravel underfoot.

“It’ll be fine,” Mrs. Wilson was saying, as if they were merely picking up a thread of conversation that had broken off a few hours or a few days before, perhaps on the path between their two homes. “You’ll see. They just need to be careful about it is all. And you’ll come right back to us. I’m sure it won’t be long at all.”