KIMIKO TAKAHASHI ARRIVED at the filling station a few days later. The feeling of terror that possessed me had dissipated but was not gone altogether. It would take a lifetime for that feeling to fade, if it ever did, if it ever has. At the very least I had managed to stop drinking in the daytime and was willing to count that as some small success.

I had heard the sedan stop at the pumps, the vehicle unfamiliar, its hood facing away from me so that I could only see the halo of dark hair around the driver’s head. But once at the window I found myself staring down into Mrs. Takahashi’s upturned face.

For a moment neither of us spoke, our simultaneous surprise rendering us both utterly speechless. Then I said quietly, “Oh,” and then, “Mrs. Takahashi.”

“John,” she said. She looked through me for a moment, toward the office, and then looked back at me once more. “You work here?”

“That’s right,” I told her. “You’re . . . are you . . . you’re traveling through or . . .”

“I’m coming to see Mrs. Wilson,” she said grimly, looking forward through the dirty windshield now.

“Right, of course,” I said, and, as she made no further comment, I began to go about my general duties, cleaning the bug-spattered glass and filling the engine, and when I returned to the driver’s side Mrs. Takahashi looked up at me, her eyes tinged, I thought, with emotion. “John, I wondered if you would do me a great favor,” she said, her voice steady despite her bright, wet eyes.

I handed her the change and told her I would be happy to do whatever it was she needed. Mrs. Takahashi asked if I knew a place where she and Mrs. Wilson could meet, and when I asked her if she needed help getting to the Wilsons’ her expression seemed to crumble in on itself like a pile of slightly damp sand. “I can’t go up there,” she said, her sentences ever tinged with the faint curl of her accent. “I thought I could but I can’t.” She looked up at me then. “You must think me very silly,” she said, “driving all the way here from San Jose. An old lady. And now I can’t even go up to a house and knock on a door.”

I supposed I might have suggested the very Denny’s restaurant where I had sat with Chiggers a few days before, or, for that matter, any of the other little cafés in town, but when I opened my mouth again what came was not the suggestion of a restaurant but of my grandmother’s home. “It’ll be private,” I told her. “My grandmother won’t bother us at all. You, I mean. And Mrs. Wilson.”