SO IT WAS TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER, TWENTY-SEVEN years in which both women had lived totally separate from each other, years which were, in sum, longer than those they had shared in the quaint, quiet town in which, in 1969, I lived with my grandmother, and while I had assumed that I was driving my aunt to visit some old friend or associate what I was actually met with in Mrs. Takahashi’s living room was a series of awkward and confusing silences. Neither woman seemed interested in talking to the other, a state which became apparent almost from the very moment in which we entered Mrs. Takahashi’s home and were bidden to sit, Mrs. Wilson in the center of a short somewhat worn sofa and Mrs. Takahashi across from her in a wingback chair. The room was a typical middle-class living room that might have been occupied by anyone at all, the only indication that its occupants had emigrated from Japan being a single print of Mount Fuji, its pyramidal shape black against a bright orange sky. Into one of the long pauses between the two women I told our host that I had seen the mountain once from the window of an airplane.

“Very beautiful,” she said in response, unsmiling but nodding, and then, as if to change the subject: “Would you like tea?”

“Oh,” I said. “Tea? I guess so. If it’s not, I mean, too much trouble.”

“No trouble,” she said simply and then stood and moved to the doorway, pausing there long enough to glance back at my aunt upon the sagging sofa. “You as well, Mrs. Wilson?”

“All right, Kim,” she said.

In the gap that followed, I watched Mrs. Wilson but she did not meet my gaze, her face tight and sharp, masklike. “I think . . . ,” I began, my throat unexpectedly dry. “I think I might wait outside.”

Mrs. Wilson’s eyes shifted to mine in an instant. “No, no,” she said, and then, in a softer register: “Please stay. Would you do that for me?”

“Sure,” I said, “but it’s just that you’re, you know, old friends. I didn’t want to . . . intrude.”

“Oh you’re not intruding,” she said.