“Yes,” her husband said, and the whole group stepped forward as one—Takahashis and Wilsons alike—and then came the loading of the parcels and suitcases into the belly of the bus and in the next moment she stepped onto the platform and up the steps, Mary and Doris ahead of her, Raymond just behind, her husband still outside. She knew he would be talking with Homer Wilson, talking with his hakujin friend this final time, but she could not even look through the windows now. Those already on the bus were silent, but some of them watched her and the children as they came up the aisle. She and the two girls slid into an empty seat, Raymond a few seats farther up, slumping by the window that faced the Wilsons, and although his back was to her, she thought his eyes were forward rather than cast out through the dusty glass to the sunlit square beyond.

And then there was her husband, his bearing crestfallen even as Homer Wilson’s voice came, muffled, from outside: “You’ll be fine, Tak.” Hiro came up the last of the steps and into the aisle, his eyes finding hers and then glancing about for an empty seat and sliding in just behind her, the next family already coming up the aisle, and then the next and the next. Her husband said nothing. Mary and Doris craned toward the window. “When are we going?” one of them said.

“Soon,” she said.

As if in response: the roar and rattle. A cloud of diesel smoke. The scent of oil. And then the great hulk lurched forward, first to second and then a grind into third. “Here we go!” Mary shouted at the window.

The buses rumbled away. In their wake, the Wilsons continued to cluster together in the bright sunlight, watching the dispersing dust, the square about them mostly empty now, the luggage and parcels and packages gone, the people gone, a few orchardists and curious townspeople and teenagers and children meandering around the space without purpose or destination.

“Dammit all to hell,” Homer Wilson muttered under his breath. “Let’s get home. Let’s get on home.”

As for Evelyn Wilson, her thoughts were only of relief. Maybe she would be lucky and they would never return. The thought felt guilty to her but had she not earned it?

She thought she could still hear the distant whine of the buses on the air, could hear it and could hear it and then faintly and fainter still until the final gargled flatulence of the diesel engine came as the faintest whisper on the distant stretch of the curving highway. And then they were gone from her life, gone for twenty-seven years right up until the day I drove her to San Jose to look once more upon the face of Kimiko Takahashi.

Chapter 5

5