“No, I meant the Buddhist church. But yes maybe the ­Methodists too.”

Mrs. Takahashi looked at her for a long moment, the expression on her face one of absolute wonder. “So they knew?” she said after a time.

“Who did?” This came from me, my question exploding out without warning so that both women turned immediately to look as if they had forgotten I still remained in the room.

“The Japanese,” she said.

“We just thought he went back to live with you,” Mrs. Wilson said then. “You know. He was there for a while and then we just didn’t see him anymore.”

She shook her head. “He never came to us. I don’t understand why he would go there at all.”

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.