All these years later that term has stuck with me because it seems to embody a kind of silence that I felt I could understand, a silence that Chiggers had touched on when we sat together on my grandmother’s porch in the night. I knew that what Mrs. Takahashi had told me did not really apply to my situation, for I had been a solider and had chosen to do what I had done, and yet the idea of it rang in my heart like a bell. To endure what you cannot control. That felt like everything I had returned to after the war. There are times today when it still does.

Mrs. Wilson looked shaken as she sat in that room, although sometimes I wondered if that was more my imagination than anything else, for she also continued to hold fast to the same steely resolve that encased her always. I had taken my grandmother’s rattling sedan to retrieve her the moment my grandmother and Mrs. Takahashi fell into conversation, relying on my grandmother’s directions to the Wilsons’. What I found was a house much smaller than my childhood memories suggested, a somewhat tawdry Victorian in need of repair standing just at the top of Ridge Road in a grove of twisted pear trees of great age, between which the grass was high and unkempt. I was relieved to see the Pontiac parked there in the small gravel turnaround and I pulled my grandmother’s coughing sedan to a stop beside it and opened the door to find that Mrs. Wilson had already appeared, her figure upon the porch complete and ready as if she expected company, a state of preparedness she always maintained as a mark of pride, even in the relative country wilderness of central Placer County.

“HELEN’S BABY,” MRS. TAKAHASHI said now. “That was why you didn’t want us to come back.” It was not a question. Mrs. Takahashi’s brown eyes peered across to where Mrs. Wilson sat, hands folded together upon her lap.

My grandmother’s appearances and disappearances into the kitchen for refreshments had settled into the relative distance of the room’s opposite corner. She was not willing to absent herself from the scene as she had when Chiggers had come but was seemingly aware of the privacy needed. If Mrs. Wilson still cared about the fact that her secret was becoming, with each sentence shared in my grandmother’s presence, no secret at all, she did not express it, although once or twice I thought I might have perceived a slight glance in my grandmother’s direction.

“Yes, that’s why,” Mrs. Wilson said.

“I wish we would have known,” Mrs. Takahashi said.

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“Because we’re Japanese.”

She said nothing in response, did not nod, did not even move, her stare unwavering.

“We didn’t understand,” Mrs. Takahashi said now. “Hiro . . . he was so hurt.”