Still in shock, Sarah followed her cousins into the Kobayashi house. At the sound of the kitchen door rolling open, Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford looked up from the low dining table where they sat doing sums on scraps of paper. From their guilty expressions, Sarah guessed they had been making financial calculations. In this period of rising yen, the vacation money that Mrs. Rexford had recently converted was increasing in value. And Mrs. Kobayashi’s stock investments, which she secretly funded with part of her household budget, were rising as well. These days, a good many Japanese housewives indulged in financial speculation for pocket money. But they were discreet about it, for such activities were not becoming to a lady.

“Girls! Why don’t you go over to the snack shop and get yourselves some ice cream,” said Mrs. Rexford. “We need a little privacy to discuss adult matters.” She stood up, rummaged in a cupboard drawer, and gave them a handful of loose change.

“What’s wrong, Big Sister?” Momoko asked as they walked over to Mrs. Yagi’s snack shop.

“Nothing,” Sarah replied shortly.

They ate their ice cream sitting outside in public, on a wooden bench set up next to the snack shop. They had purchased the new ice cream phenomenon, Jewelry Box, currently advertised on television. It was a single-serving container of vanilla ice cream, in which “jewels” were embedded: shards of colored ice in red and blue and yellow and green.

The afternoon street was deserted, with cicadas droning in full force. The girls scraped carefully with their wooden spoons. “Look,” said Momoko. “I got a red diamond!”

“I got a green one!” said Yashiko.

As Sarah’s shock wore off, her anger grew. She itched to strike back at Mrs. Asaki, who overprotected her grandchildren at the expense of another child’s feelings. And those grandchildren weren’t even hers!

Yashiko left the bench and wandered away to examine an anthill.

“She really likes bugs,” Momoko remarked. “She says she’s going to be a scientist when she grows up.”

Sarah turned to face Momoko. The gathering force of her feelings flickered into a flame of intention.

“You know what?” she said. “I bet you didn’t know that Granny Asaki isn’t your real grandmother.” After so many weeks of vigilance it was a relief, like poking at a house of cards.

Momoko listened, looking suitably awed. But she accepted the story much more readily than Sarah would have expected.

“I thought there was something funny,” she said finally.

“You did? Really? Why?”

“Because Granny’s so much older than all my friends’ grandmothers.”

“Oh.” That simple logic had never occurred to Sarah.

They sat in silence. Sarah’s anger, now drained, was replaced by dawning horror at what she had just done. If the grown-ups ever found out…! Her mother’s new tenderness, her place in the women’s circle, everything would be ruined.

“You can never, never tell anyone you know,” said Sarah desperately. “Do you promise? Ne, do you promise?”

“Nnn,” agreed Momoko in that bland, agreeable way of children. It did not inspire confidence.

Sarah thrust out her pinkie finger, and Momoko hooked it with her own. But Sarah felt doomed. An eleven-year-old child could not be trusted. She herself had already slipped up, and she’d known for less than a month.

“Sarah-chan, don’t pick at your food,” said Mrs. Rexford. “It’s an insult to your grandmother’s cooking.”

In the two days since the incident with Momoko, Sarah had eaten hardly anything but rice and umeboshi. To the puzzlement of the adults, she had taken to watching television in the middle of the day until Mrs. Rexford firmly turned off the TV set. This afternoon Sarah had hidden away on the garden veranda and watched Mr. Kobayashi sketching designs for his upcoming show.

She now gave a short bow of apology toward her grandmother. She choked down a bite of breaded prawn. Her mother watched her with an inscrutable expression.

“Let’s go for a stroll,” said Mrs. Rexford after dinner. “I want to show you a special place.”

Mother and daughter strolled through the lanes until they reached the main thoroughfare. It was pleasantly busy with evening traffic: people coasting by, straight backed, on bicycles; locals strolling to the bathhouse carrying plastic washbasins and towels.

With the sureness of a local, Mrs. Rexford slipped into a small opening between a cigarette shop and a bus-token stand. Here, tucked away from the outside world, was a pocket-sized temple area. A roofed platform displayed a standing stone Buddha with an outstretched hand. At the foot of the statue lay homely offerings of flowers, in glass household jars washed clean of labels.

“I like this little place,” said Mrs. Rexford. She headed for a bench and Sarah followed her. In the dim gray light of evening, this little clearing had a magical quality. They sat for a while in peaceful companionship.

After a while her mother turned to her and said, very gently, “What’s wrong?”

Before this tenderness to which she was still unaccustomed, Sarah crumbled. As she blurted out her secret, she watched her mother’s eyes change from puzzled concern to sharp comprehension. At this, she began to cry with dry, harsh sobs.

“I don’t know why I did it,” she sobbed. And it was true, for at this point her reasons seemed nothing short of insane.

She hadn’t cried like this with her mother in years. Some detached part of her now savored this reversion to childhood, knowing it was probably the last time she would cry with such abandon.

As if from a great distance, she heard her mother saying, “Sarah-chan, Sarah-chan, it’s not the end of the world. I’m not angry. There’s no need to cry.”

She lifted her eyes. The light had grown slightly grayer. In the silence between her hiccups, she could hear the peaceful pulsing of crickets.

“Momoko would have found out sometime,” Mrs. Rexford said.

“She wasn’t supposed…to know until…” Traditionally, adopted children weren’t told of their status until they came of age. Neighbors and friends were trusted to keep a discreet silence.

“Oh, that doesn’t matter with the second generation,” said Mrs. Rexford. “A grandmother’s hardly the same thing as a mother.”

“But why…then…all the secrecy…”

“It’s to protect Granny Asaki. She wants so much for those girls to think of her as their real grandmother. She’d be really hurt if they switched their affections to someone else. But as long as they pretend not to know about it, there’s no harm done.”

“But I’m afraid…Momo-chan will blab. I’ve been so worried.”

“It’ll be all right,” said Mrs. Rexford confidently. “Sure, she might tell someone, but it’ll be her mother, it won’t be Granny. That girl knows her way around. This is how it is when you grow up in a complicated family. Your aunt and I were like that too. We were used to the pressure, so we never buckled.”

Sarah felt utterly chastened.

“I’ll go talk to your auntie tomorrow, just to make sure,” Mrs. Rexford said. “But don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”

“Will she be mad?” At the thought of her aunt’s gentle face, Sarah almost began to cry again.

“To tell you the truth,” her mother said, “I think she’d like her girls to know who their real grandma is.” There was a knowing quality in her voice that made Sarah realize that the sisters, for all their differences, shared some deep, unspoken rapport.

“Slipups happen to the best of us,” Mrs. Rexford continued. “Your auntie learned about her situation when she was about Momoko’s age.”

“Oh no…”

“She heard a rumor at school and came to me to ask if it was true. She was quiet, kind of shaken. She seemed so alone. I sat her down and told her that our mother never wanted to give her away, that she’d always regretted it. I think it helped. I hope it helped.”

They sat quietly. The dusk had deepened, and the standing Buddha was now a flat, dark silhouette.

“Did she talk to Granny?”

“No. We kept that conversation a secret from the adults. To this very day, neither your grandma nor Granny has any idea she found out early.”

Sarah lifted her face to look at her mother. Their eyes met in relief that they had been spared such a fate.

Never again was Sarah fully at ease around the Asaki household.

She was ashamed to meet her aunt Masako’s eyes. And in Momoko she no longer saw a simple child, but an additional complication in the forward-thinking game. Now, if her grandmother bought her a new dress or a trinket, Sarah hid it from her cousins. She constantly searched Momoko’s eyes, alert for any signs of jealousy.

If she could be so angry after just one look from Mrs. Asaki, then how could it not be different for her aunt and cousin? What resentments did they feel that they could not express?

Thus it came about that Sarah drew away from the Asaki house, choosing to adopt the social boundaries of her elders. As the years passed, the distance between the girls would grow to resemble that of the generation before them.