So her son had returned home from the war, had survived it, but somehow in all that time had failed to contact his parents at all, had not sent a telegram, had not written a postcard, had instead lived in and around Newcastle for as long as forty-two days, forty-two days in which he had been alive and she had not even known it, a time during which he had been no farther than my aunt and I had driven that very day, a matter of hours, a span of time so slight that even to consider that her son had been that close and alive and she had not even known it felt to her like a direct repudiation of everything she had already reconciled herself to believe: that her beloved son had been killed fighting for the same country that had put not only himself but also his mother and father and his two sisters behind barbed wire. But that had not been the case.

“It’s not possible,” Mrs. Takahashi said now. “We searched everywhere. My husband even went back to Newcastle to look. He wasn’t there.”

“I didn’t know that,” Mrs. Wilson said.

“You’re mistaken. It was someone else you saw.”

“I’m not mistaken, Kim. I don’t know why you didn’t find him. Maybe your husband came before your son got to ­California, or after he left. Raymond was there. I swear he was.”

“Tell me what happened,” she said, her voice a dry rasp. They were both sitting now, Mrs. Takahashi on one side of the little table, Mrs. Wilson on the other, the two woman flanking the window through which bright yellow light glowed without direction or angle.

“I am,” Mrs. Wilson said. “I have.”

“From the beginning.”

Mrs. Wilson’s body seemed, for the briefest moment, to slump, to drain, before righting itself again, the spine once more in a long ruler-straight line from waist to head. “It was a long time ago,” she said now, and when Mrs. Takahashi began to speak again she lifted a hand and the other woman fell immediately to silence. “But I’ll try,” Mrs. Wilson said.

When she began again, Mrs. Wilson indeed started at the beginning, although it was not quite the opening scene I have supplied here. In her retelling, she was told that Ray had returned by her orchard foreman and had only seen him from a distance—perhaps in town or in Auburn a few times—so that there was, in effect, very little to tell.

“You have to remember everything,” Mrs. Takahashi said.

“But I’m sorry I just don’t.”

“Who else did he talk to?”

“I don’t know, Kim.”

“Where did he stay?”

“I’m not sure.” She paused then. “Maybe at the church? I know some of the Japs—I’m sorry—the Japanese stayed there. At least that’s what I heard.”

“The Methodists?”