He looked up at her. “Do what?”

  Anna thought of her grandmother, lying in the suitcase. She thought of Ford in his bed facing the dogwoods, and she knew that she was beyond the point at which she could watch Henry put himself at risk. “I’m going to have to be the one to go into the water.”

  Henry stared up at her from where he had seated himself on the grass. He already had one shoe off, but none of these tasks were easy or comfortable for a man in his eighties. “Saving fish isn’t your battle,” he told her.

  Anna sat down beside him and began to pull off Goldie’s heels. She had no interest in discussing the life experiences that had led her to this point, but she knew that she could not allow Henry Nakamura to step into the water. “Actually, it is my battle,” she said.

  Somehow, they managed. Anna took off her jacket, rolled her sleeves far past her elbows, pulled on the boots, and tucked the legs of her trousers down into them. Despite these precautions, she had no illusions that the Armani suit would emerge undamaged. Sure enough, as soon as she stepped into the pond, she felt a splash of water crest the top of the boots and run down her leg. She kept walking anyway, making slow progress across the pond. Once she reached the rocky ledge, it took some maneuvering, amid the swirl of suddenly disoriented fish, to find the ailing Miss Cho. Surprisingly, the fish didn’t put up a fight, though Anna did have to reach fairly deeply into the water to grasp her. Somehow she managed to haul the fish out of the water, walk it back across and out of the pond, and hold it on the wet towel while Henry spread some kind of salve across the wound. Then, gently, Anna carried the fish back down to the ledge, squatted down, and released her into the water.

  As Anna pulled off the boots and rearranged her now-wet clothes, Henry repacked the supplies and prepared to hide the tub back under the tree with the wet towels draped on top of it. “She’s awfully pretty,” Anna said, looking down at Miss Cho, who had reassumed her place beneath the rocky overhang.

  A couple of tourists, holding hands, ambled by and paused to look down into the koi pond. The now-placid water showed no hint of the disturbance that had taken place only minutes before. “She adored that fish,” Henry said.

  Anna looked at him. Was he one of those old people whose attention constantly drifted to the past? “Your wife?” she asked.

  Henry threw his head back, laughing. “Oh, dear no. Not my wife. She played bridge. I’m talking about Goldie. She loved Miss Cho.”

  As Anna followed Henry back to the teahouse, she tried to imagine the circumstances in which her grandmother would love a fish, even one as beautiful as Miss Cho. Unfortunately, though, Anna could not imagine Goldie in any way at that moment, except in reaction to the state of her Armani suit. Patches of wet fabric clung to Anna’s legs. She reeked of pond. Goldie would kill her.

  It wasn’t until they had returned to the pavilion that Anna, washing her hands at the small sink by the kitchen, realized that she had lost Ford’s ring. The days of grasping Bridget’s steering wheel in the blazing sun had browned the skin on her hands, except for one newly evident pink strip across her thumb, where the ring used to be.

  She must have made some audible gasp of surprise, because Henry, seated at a table at the edge of the pavilion a few feet away, sounded alarmed. “Is everything all right, my dear?”

  Anna stared down at her hand and thought of the slimy pond water, the slippery fish, the looseness of the gold band on her thumb. She pictured Ford’s ring, slowly falling until it settled into the sand beneath the rocky ledge.

  “I lost my ring,” she said. She noticed a curious flatness to her voice, which didn’t at all match the tumult inside her. “My husband’s wedding ring.”

  When she turned from the sink and looked at Henry, his face was filled with concern. “He died,” Anna explained. “My husband, Ford. He died two years ago. I’ve been wearing his ring.” Her eyes scanned the teahouse, darting from the concrete floor to the wooden eaves to the little rattan chairs around the empty tables. Of course, she didn’t see the ring in any of those places. “It’s probably back at the pond.” She was halfway across the pavilion already.

  “Anna?”

  The sound of Henry’s voice made her stop. She looked back and saw that he had pulled himself up from his chair. “Why don’t you have some tea first? You could use a rest. We could look at the artwork together. If it’s possible to find your husband’s ring now, I would think we could also find it in half an hour.”

  Anna wanted to say that waiting half an hour would do nothing to relieve the anxiety she felt at this moment, but she also noticed that Henry was using his cane for support now. Perhaps he had depleted his reserves saving that fish. She had come here, after all, to meet him. She should at least sit with him for a few minutes before rushing off to dig in the sand at the bottom of the pond. Anna thought of Goldie and how fragile she looked at night, as if every ounce of stamina had been spent in the effort of getting through the day, and she realized that she could not abandon Henry now. “I guess you’re right,” she said. She walked back to their table, and they both sat down.

  Henry glanced toward the kitchen, from which they could now hear the sounds of activity. “Our tea should be ready soon. It can fortify your search.” When Anna didn’t respond, he added, “Your grandmother was always a big fan of Japanese tea.”

  Anna remembered the Nightingale Palace, and she told him about the game she and Goldie used to play.

  He seemed to like that. “I don’t know if she cared more about the tea itself or the ceremony that went with it,” he said. “I do know that your grandmother loved good manners more than anyone I ever met.”

  “That’s so true.” Despite her anxiety about the ring, Anna began to laugh, surprised that he would remember such a telling detail.

  “How is she?” Henry asked. He was still smiling, but his expression had taken on a certain awkward formality, which seemed tender and self-conscious at the same time.

  “She’s great.” The intensity of Henry’s gaze made Anna suddenly protective of Goldie, but she also felt that, after all these years, he deserved some concrete information. “We had some problems when we drove through Indiana, but now she seems as good as new. Her life has been very full.” It wasn’t easy to summarize the past sixty years, so she detailed the various milestones—Goldie’s husbands, her son, the family’s business successes. “My grandfather was kind of a homebody, but my grandmother loves to travel. She still does, after all these years. She’s leaving for a cruise out of Dubai tomorrow.”

  “Lovely,” said Henry. His attention suddenly shifted to the waitress, to whom he offered a grateful smile for her appearance with the tea tray. Middle-aged and wearing a kimono, the woman tottered toward them on a pair of dangerous-looking wooden sandals, the tea tray in both hands and, over one arm, a wool blanket that she motioned for Anna to take and drape over her clammy body. She must have been a comrade on the fish patrol.

  “Thank you, Yukiko,” Henry said. Anna pulled the blanket over her legs, and they both watched as the waitress set a teapot, cups, saucers, and a bowl of rice crackers on the table in front of them. Then she silently went away again.

  Henry leaned forward and peeked inside the teapot. “We’ll let it steep for a few minutes.”

  “I’d like to hear about your family, too,” Anna said. “I’m sure my grandmother will want to know.”

  “Of course,” Henry said. He told her that his sister, Mayumi, had opened a boutique dress shop in Los Angeles and that Kim Novak and Audrey Hepburn had been ardent clients. Henry had remained in San Francisco, building his antiques business. These days, though he still went to the office most mornings, his two sons ran the daily operations. He and his wife, Akemi, had been married fifty years, but she had passed away in the 1990s. Since then, he had lived in an apartment on Russian Hill, not far from his boys.

  “It’s nice that your family lives nearby,” Anna said.

  Henry, leaning back in his chair, traced the tip of his cane along the low stone wall that separated the pavilion from the garden beyond. “My sons are devoted and I love them. But, you know, I’ve always been independent. I traveled so much with my business. Sometimes I’d be in Europe for months, purchasing antiques. I wasn’t always attentive to my wife and children. My sons still feel angry sometimes. I wasn’t a perfect father.”

  This revelation, spoken with a tinge of remorse, surprised Anna, and she felt honored that he would be so candid with her. Still, she took so long to respond that Henry began to laugh. “I’m such an old man, dear,” he told her. “My children often treat me like a child, so you’ll have to forgive me for taking the opportunity to have an adult conversation.”

  The tea, he decided, had steeped enough. He poured them each a cup, then jiggled the bowl of rice crackers, bringing some of the dried green peas to the surface. “I’m supposed to stay away from salt, but I cheat,” he said, sliding the bowl toward Anna.

  She tasted a few. “Delicious.”

  Henry said, “You really do have your grandmother’s eyes.”

  Maybe his interest reflected nothing more than curiosity over similarities between family members, but his gaze was so piercing that Anna had to look away. “My sister and father have the dark circles under their eyes, too,” she said, trying to hide a sudden surge of shame, because Henry was so kind and Goldie had abandoned these people. Was that Anna’s responsibility now?

  Henry said, “My sister adored Goldie. She loved everything about her.”

  It was, finally, this expression of unbounded devotion that gave Anna the impetus to address the issue directly. “I’m really sorry,” she said, mustering the courage to look at him. “I’m sorry that my grandmother just left San Francisco, and I’m sorry that she took your portfolio and disappeared.”

  Henry stared at her, trying to piece together what Anna was saying. Then, figuring it out, he raised his hands in the air as if to stop her. “Not at all, dear. You have to understand that the war was going on. That meant everything.” His face now filled with emotion, and it took him a moment to find the words to continue. “Goldie did nothing wrong. Ever. Anyway, we heard bits and pieces over the years. Our friend Eugene Blankenship always kept us posted.”

  Anna was stunned. “You knew Mr. Blankenship?” All through her childhood, Mr. Blankenship, the proprietor of a Palm Beach shop called Eugene’s, had come by the house whenever the Rosenthal granddaughters came to visit. The very English Mr. Blankenship had never had a family of his own, and he brought odd and wonderful gifts—trains on roller coasters, banana-shaped telephones, picture frames with secret compartments. Sadie later said that it was Eugene Blankenship, rather than any of the Queer Theorists she met at Yale, who convinced her that one could be gay and lead a full, rich life. Mr. Blankenship had died a few months after his one hundred and second birthday.

  “Of course,” replied Henry. “We were friends for over fifty years.”

  The waitress brought them a plate of sweets—peach-shaped candies surrounded by pale green sugary leaves. A group of elderly men carrying cameras—maybe a photography club?—stood clustered around a maple tree that leaned out over the stream. Henry watched Anna. After a while he said, “Would you tell me about Ford?”

  Anna kept her eyes on the photographers by the stream. Under other circumstances, she could not have managed to answer such a question, but something about Henry made her try. “Well, he was a university librarian,” she said. “Super smart. When he was healthy, he probably read ten novels for every one I finished. And he was funny and very kind, too, at least until the end. He got pretty crabby then.”

  “People do,” said Henry.

  “They do. It’s not fair, I guess, to blame him for that, though I often have. Anyway, he was diagnosed with leukemia about five years ago, and then he died the year before last. What else? He loved jazz, which doesn’t do a thing for me.”

  Henry said, “Jazz doesn’t do a thing for me, either.”

  Anna picked up one of the sugar leaves and set it on her tongue, where it began to melt. “Nobody’s perfect.”

  Henry raised his cup as if to toast. “Nobody’s perfect,” he agreed.

  Anna let her eyes settle on the strip of pink flesh on her thumb. “I’ve been in an in-between period since he died,” she said.

  “In-between what?”

  “In-between that part of my life and whatever comes next.” The sugar leaf had disappeared, and Anna dug around in the cracker bowl again, pulling out four or five little peas and popping them into her mouth rather manically.

  Henry said, “I had a sort of in-between period at one point in my life, too.”

  Anna looked at him. “When was that?”

  “Living in the camps, out in the desert,” Henry said. “I was so lost. What did I know of the desert? I’d seen pictures of the dunes of the Sahara, but this place was ugly. Even the mountains were ugly, like animals stripped of their skin and left to die. My grandchildren go camping in the desert. They tell me it’s so stark and beautiful and the nights are full of stars. I never saw it that way. I used to walk behind the barracks. It was just dirt and scrub brush out there. Going back there frightened me, but I went as often as I could. It gave me comfort to be alone. You know what I did?”

  “What?”

  He closed his eyes. “It’s a cliché. I would walk out there, all alone, and I would squat down and dig my hands into the dirt and then lift up handfuls and let it sift through my fingers. My sister was an artist. She collected that dirt and found fossilized shells in it. She used the shells to make tiny, exquisite pieces of jewelry. But I wasn’t like that at all. I carved wood, but I hated every minute of it. I felt so sorry for myself. I would just think, ‘This is my life. This is my life passing by.’ ” He opened his eyes and looked at Anna. He looked terribly sad for a moment, but then he suddenly laughed and shook his head. “I was quite melodramatic as a young man. My emotions were always right on the edge.”

  “I feel that way sometimes,” Anna said.

  He poured them both more tea. “Grief is a kind of prison, too.”

  Anna thought about this for a few seconds. “I keep thinking I need a plan,” she said.

  “You don’t need a plan. You just need to move through the day with the idea that something good could happen to you. It might not have happened yesterday, but it could happen today.”

  The waitress had brought the portfolio over from where she’d kept it for them in the kitchen, and Anna opened it now. Together, she and Henry went through every picture. She told him how, over the past few weeks, she had often copied Hiroshige’s images into her sketchbook, and she told him that the work inspired her. He seemed to take pleasure from that, and pleasure, too, from paging through the book with her. “My father loved this one,” he said, pointing to one of the Hiroshige images, a narrow road running up the side of a mountain with the ocean far below. Of another image, a village gate at night with a moon hanging over it, he said, “My mother used to sing songs about the moon.”

  Anna turned the book to the Kunisada prints and found, among the “lady pictures,” the one of the girl in front of the screen. “This is my grandmother’s favorite,” she said. “She told me that it describes the emotions of her life back then.”

  Henry stared down at the picture. “I didn’t know that,” he said. “Really?”

  When they reached the end of the book, Henry closed it and held it on his lap. “On the telephone, you mentioned that you planned to return these to me,” he said.

  “Your family gave them away under duress. They belong to you.”

  He shook his head. “We experienced duress, yes, but not in regard to these pictures. They’re Goldie’s.”

  “No. Your family should have them.”

  “Anna?”

  “Yes?”

  “They’re Goldie’s. If she doesn’t want them, they’re yours.”

  She could see in his face that the discussion was over. “Thank you,” she said.

  They finished their tea. Henry looked at his watch. “I suppose you want to go back to the pond now?”

  Anna rubbed at the place on her hand where Ford’s ring used to be. “It’s not a bad spot, really.”

  “What?”

  “The fish pond in the Japanese Tea Garden. I’ve been trying to find a place for it.”

  Henry gazed at her. “You’re thinking of leaving the ring there?”

  “Why not?”

  The waitress came and cleared away the dishes. Henry seemed to be considering Anna’s decision. After a while, he said, “It is a pretty place, under the willow trees.”

  They walked out toward the front gate of the garden together. “Did things get better for you, when you left the camp?” Anna asked.

  Henry looked at her. “Are you wondering if I’ve remained miserable for the rest of my life?”

  She shrugged. “I guess.”

  “No. My experience in Utah changed me completely. I became determined after that.”

  The clouds had parted and they stopped in the shade of a gingko tree near the front entrance. Anna’s smelly clothes had dried stiffly and felt increasingly uncomfortable in the heat. She was not quite ready to say good-bye, though. “This may surprise you, given all that I said, but I’m actually kind of hopeful about the future,” she told him.

  Henry placed the tip of his cane between his feet, resting both hands on the knobby handle. He was looking at Anna more seriously now. “Hope is good,” he said, “but hope is passive. You’re responsible for yourself, you know.”

  Something in this advice made Anna think of Goldie. “My grandmother says, ‘Make your own party.’ ”

  At that moment, it seemed to Anna that Henry’s eyes became infused with a different kind of light. His face relaxed and slowly eased into a smile. “That sounds just like Goldie,” he told her. And then, though it was obviously time to go, they remained where they were for a few more seconds, looking up at the pale green leaves of the gingko, which spread over their heads like thousands and thousands of tiny fans.