Doris and Mary were there now, out of breath and excited. The sound that came up the old highway was of the hard, high squeal of air brakes and then the great roar of a diesel engine pushing up the hill. “Where’s Raymond?” Hiro asked them.

“Dunno,” Mary said, Doris having already spun away again, the dust clouding all around her.

“Go find him,” her father said.

The girl was off at a sprint and after a time the buses appeared, three of them in all, their great broad shapes turning in a slow circle around the lot and coming to a stop in a single line, the doors opening one after the other as if choreographed, the rattle of their idling diesel engines and the seep of their exhaust infusing the air with the scent and feel of pistons and gears and the slow drip of oil, and then the engines stuttered to silence. From the windows, faces peered into the bright spring sunlight. Kimiko thought she recognized some of them but there were many she did not; so they would be clambering onto a strange bus filled with strangers headed to a strange place, and this after she had left behind her home and her country and even her language to live here with a man she had not even seen before and to make a life with him as his wife, the whole size and shape of her own destiny seeming in that moment to weigh upon her heart like a great and terrible stone.

A man had come down from one of the buses—a tall, rangy hakujin in a serge suit and floppy necktie—and it was from his thin, nasal voice that their names began to fill the air. Someone was checking their luggage tags to make sure everything had been properly labeled. She had painted each of their bags with the number and their name. Raymond had returned from wherever he had gone. Mary and Doris too.

“Takahashi,” the man in the suit called. He paused and then added: “Hiroshi.”