“Don’t tell Raymond,” she had told her husband before he left the room, pipe in hand. “Don’t tell any of them but especially not Raymond.”

“Of course I won’t tell him.”

“It would destroy him.”

“He’s tough.”

“Just don’t tell any of them.”

“I won’t,” he said simply. And then he was outside and the door clacked closed behind him.

What she thought then was a kind of terrible relief. Everything was clear at last. The tenor of the words themselves—their style, their sparsity, the directness of their expression—had obliterated what she knew had been one of her husband’s central beliefs: that they were, he and Homer Wilson, somehow equals, this despite the fact that Homer Wilson was white and an American citizen and a landowner and therefore part of the very fabric of the nation in a way that her husband and herself and their children could never be. Their internment was only the latest in a long series of differences that stacked one against the other from the moment she had been sold across the sea in the joint conspiracy between the matchmaker and her parents. Hiro had told the children that it was for their own good, that they might well have been physically attacked had they remained in Placer County with the fervor of anti-Japanese sentiment roiling the air. What a naïve fool.

But she knew who she was. She was Japanese. That was how she thought of herself and knew she would continue to think of herself no matter how many years she lived in this country. She had understood this long before the buses had arrived and it had become plain to everyone who could call themselves Americans and who could not.