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Her nightmares have turned sweet. Suchi can smell sour plums on the horizon. Is it already so late in spring? she murmurs. Later, she will wake and remember yesterday's careless words; she will lose half a lifetime to regret. But for now: she can feel the warm heft of Haiwen's presence encircling hers, the tender touch of his hand cupping her face, and she believes he has forgiven her. Her body unclenches. Right before a deep, untroubled sleep claims her, she hears his voice in her ear, kind, reassuring. Soon, he promises her, the plum rains are almost here.

January 2008

Los Angeles

A chorus of violins ushered Suchi into Howard's life for the third and final time. Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major, celebratory and elegant, floated out of muffled speakers in the 99 Ranch Market, its golden jubilation incongruous with Howard's mood, the blank haze of gray he'd been living in since he'd buried Linyee sixteen months earlier. He glanced up from the bananas he was inspecting to search for the source of his irritation. Instead, he saw her.

She was picking up Korean melons, their skins the color of lemon curd. He watched her knock on them with her knuckles, her head bent to listen. Howard was sure it was Suchi this time, but he had mistaken so many women for her over the last four decades. Women with cheekbones like hers, gaits like hers, but who transformed into other people when he approached. He stood transfixed. This woman's face was plump and sagging, her hair was thin and gray at the roots, but her eyes—eyes never changed, he had once heard someone say. And hers, caramel and bright, were every bit as intense as he remembered, even in the task of selecting the ripest melon

"Excuse me," he said hesitantly in Mandarin, and she glanced up. Her eyes widened.

"Wang Haiwen." The name came out carefully, more a statement than a question.

For a moment he couldn't respond. He was a child again, a teenager again, not in this American supermarket but in the alleyways of their youth. He gripped the handle of his shopping cart, feeling the bite of plastic where it was uneven. "So it is you," he said.

"Wang Haiwen," she said, more briskly this time, a confirmation. She smiled, revealing teeth too straight and white to be real.

He pulled his cart alongside hers. His, empty aside from three bunches of bananas; hers, already filled with various greens, tomatoes, a box of Asian pears, and a daikon radish. "You live here now?" he asked. It was a dumb question; he didn't know what else to say.

"I moved in with my son and daughter-in-law a couple years ago," she answered in Shanghainese.

A jolt ran through him. Howard had not heard his childhood language in several years, and it caused in him an aching relief, the sensation reminiscent of a sour candy his granddaughter had once given him.

"They said they needed help with the grandchildren," Suchi continued, "but to be honest, I think they worried I was getting lonely, living all alone."

Howard understood that loneliness. Each morning he woke up to an empty house and expected to hear Linyee in the kitchen, pots clanging, a mug being washed, a soap opera keening on the television set. Instead, he heard nothing but the breeze in the trees, or a lone pigeon purring, or the neighbors mowing their lawn.

"And you?" Suchi asked. "Have you lived in Los Angeles long?"

"We've been here for about thirty years," Howard responded in Shanghainese, then inwardly revised. Not we anymore. I.

Suchi's eyes grew soft. "And your wife?"

Had he become that transparent? Did every thought of Linyee paint itself across his face whether or not he wanted it to?

"Linyee passed away a little over a year ago," he said quietly.