He looked at her, kept looking at her even when she turned her eyes away. “How long you been living here?” he said.

“What do you want?”

“I’m just looking,” he said. And he was, his eyes following the shape of her as one might follow the shape of a candle flame in a dark room, his gaze not unlike that which had met Frank Marston in the shadow of the fruit shed, unwavering and focused, his attention so complete as to be utterly unnerving, threatening only in the fact that he would not look away.

“He’s just in back,” she said again before breaking with a quick, jerking pace, away from him. Then the bang of the back door, the screen. How strange that some woman he did not know had made that sound, not his mother nor his sisters nor even his father. Not Jimmy or Helen either. Through the window the two young faces he had seen when he first approached the house peered out at him with frank curiosity until the curtains were pulled roughly into position.

That this would be his homecoming could not have been a surprise. Although we did not know the specifics we knew at least that he would have corresponded with his father during the war years and that, if nothing else, Tak would have told his son that the family would not be found in the orchard beside the Wilsons’ ranch but instead in Oakland, where they were unceremoniously crammed into the apartment of a distant relative Ray had never met. Perhaps this had been his imagined destination when he had been in Europe, the remains of his unit waiting in Nice under the full hot Mediterranean sun. But something changed in the days of waiting in France and during the long sultry summer that followed after they had at last been loaded aboard the Liberty ship that took him first to Fort Dix and then, via lucky happenstance, to an empty seat aboard a military transport crossing the continent from east to west in leaps and fits. After changing planes and cargo trucks and planes again, he found himself in California once more, first at Camp Pendleton and then, again via lucky happenstance, on a ship bound for Fort Mason in San Francisco, arriving there in August to the news that a bomb of epic destructive power had been loosed upon the Japanese city of Hiroshima.