Mrs. Wilson did not respond. It was all too much. She had come to Mrs. Takahashi to enlist her help only to be faced with something else entirely, the realization that Raymond Takahashi’s mother had believed, all these years, that her son had perished in the war even though the army had informed her (her husband really, for it had been he who had written the Secretary of the Army) that he had been discharged. They had entered a period of panic then—this I would learn later—calling the Buddhist church, calling those few orchardists who had returned to Placer County, only to be told again and again that Raymond had not been seen, Hiro even driving there to speak to the priest in person and to be told this same information yet again. I believe now that Hiro missed finding news of his son by mere days, for his visit to Placer County must have been only a week or two before Raymond’s arrival, so that when Raymond himself had visited the church and the priest there had told him that his father had come looking for him, Raymond’s response must have been to thank the priest and to tell him a lie: that he had already returned to visit his parents and sisters and that there was no need to worry. He was a dutiful son. The priest would have nodded and smiled and that would have been the end of it. There would have been no reason for the priest or anyone else to contact the Takahashis in Oakland. Meanwhile, his parents continued to write the army, once, twice, a dozen times, asking for explanation and finally coming to accept the only truth that seemed possible: that Raymond was dead, that he had perished in Italy or Germany or France and that the army, through what her husband had called a “clerical error,” had neglected to report it correctly. But now this, this new knowledge, which Mrs. Wilson was beginning to understand, and I with her, was yet more important than any secret pregnancy or even of the existence of the child.

Still Mrs. Wilson did not tell her of Raymond’s appearance on her porch that hot summer day, or of what she learned later about his altercation with her foreman, Bob Campo, nor did she offer any real specificity of what she knew of his movements in the county, despite the fact that she had followed those movements with some care. Her only goal at that time had been to keep him away from Helen at all costs, but her daughter was almost twenty then and had been dating a local boy, a white boy, and it was therefore nearly impossible to keep her indoors.

“I’m sorry, Kim,” Mrs. Wilson said. “I just assumed he’d gone to find you.”

For a long while the room rang with silence.

“I don’t understand it,” Mrs. Takahashi said at last. “I just don’t understand it at all.”

Chapter 7

7