When Carl gets up he gives Josef’s shoulder a quick squeeze. A firm squeeze, as if to say, Everything’s all right now. You’re here. You’re here. That’s how it was before: they were simply there, and all of a sudden it’s like it used to be, for a brief, fleeting second. Then he stands up and follows his brother into the kitchen.

He keeps catching himself staring at Edith. She wears a thin, floral-print summer dress that catches between her legs when she stands up. Her hair is set in waves, an old-fashioned hairstyle; it’s been a long time since he’s seen a woman wear it. She is both shy and self-possessed, the latter whenever she can set the table and serve. She does it almost forcefully.

They eat a very sour pie with lots of cherries—“We don’t have any butter or sugar,” Edith explains. The children, a boy and a girl, are so quiet and obviously frightened that later, when he lies down on the sofa, he can’t say what they look like. He remembers, however, that the boy kept nervously blinking, clearly a tic. Carl at one point raised his hand and whispered, “Stop that!” But the son didn’t stop.

He dozes off for a moment and is woken by Carl’s voice: “Leave it. You’ll let the heat in! Leave the door closed!” Then he hears Edith’s mild voice, and again Carl shouting: “Let her live out on the street, then, if she likes the sun so much!”

Carl’s shouting. He hasn’t heard his brother’s voice in twenty-five years. And now he sounds like their father.

When they parted twenty-five years ago, the wound was still fresh. They had removed the eye quickly after the accident at the factory. At the time, they couldn’t get anything more out of Carl about what happened to him; first a yell, then he started screaming and couldn’t stop. That was what his fellow welders later reported, and Carl, in the hospital bed, said nothing. A mute reproach in this silence, and this reproach was directed at life itself, or maybe America’s immigration laws. The first thing the loss of his eye meant was losing his entry visa. They had learned English together, but at Ellis Island Carl would have gotten an X written on his shoulder in white chalk and been sent back.

In his first letters Josef restricted himself to saying how hard life as an immigrant was, how disliked Germans were, how difficult it was to find work, how high the rents were. And it was all true too.

That evening they all sit at the large dining table in the parlor. Edith serves vegetable soup and explains defensively that it all comes from the garden. Carl stares at the beer glass filled with water in his hand.