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Barbie doll, maybe a little smaller. It looked exactly like a little wooden temple, with a glass door, writing, a tiny altar, everything. There were three small bowls for freshwater, uncooked rice, and salt.
    The shrine had an envelope with special blessed tissue paper in it. I used the paper on anything that hurt. I wet it and put it on any sore spot, like a cut, and by morning, the sore spot had disappeared. The kids even used it on their zits.
    Charlie dismissed it as toilet paper. Charlie was a Mormon. I did not believe in his God, he did not believe in mine.
    Here I also kept my other small treasures: a few Japanese dolls with real hair and silk kimonos; clay pots the children made; photos.
    I clapped my hands twice for the kamisama ’s attention, praying for my heart. I prayed for Mike and Sue to be happy. I asked that my granddaughter, Helena, do well in school. I wanted Charlie’s knee to be healed. Most of all, for a good ten minutes, I prayed for my brother.
    Charlie came in with more laundry. “Why do you already have your good clothes on? Your appointment’s not until after lunch.”
    “I like get ready early.” I sat on my dressing stool. I want to go to Japan, I wanted to say. I want you to come.
    But Charlie was looking grumpy. He rooted around in his sock drawer. “Where are my thick white socks?”
    “How I know? You do laundry,” I reminded him. “Why you no go walk?” It would improve his mood. Besides, the doctor had told him to lose weight or get diabetes. His potbelly was so big it pitched him forward and rounded his posture. Nothing like the skinny corpsman I had met.
    He put on some other socks and cheap tennis shoes from the drugstore. “My knee hurts.” Charlie hated sweating. In Vietnam, his skin got tan—really his freckles growing together. He said that was enough outdoor time for him forever.
    I wished that my knee was the only thing hurting me. “That ’cause you got two hundred extra pounds on it,” I said. Charlie huffed and puffed and left the room. His idea of a walk was down four houses, up three houses.
    I went into the living room. Charlie turned up Rush Limbaugh so loud you could hear it from outside. Sometimes I listened, too. Charlie nodded along, and I asked questions. “Why these feminazis love hate everybody so much? Why Rush got yell all time?”
    Today, wanting quiet, I went in the backyard with my Sanka. Charlie had built a patio of old bricks; it was the best thing he had ever made, because he had done it properly, on a sand bed with a wooden border holding it in place. Overhead, I grew Chinese wisteria on the porch roof, the wild vines shooting up onto the house’s roof, too. Purple flowers would be hanging down soon.
    I fretted again about my trip to Japan. About my hesokuri , my hidden stash of money, and how I would have to ask Sue to buy the airline tickets on the computer. I sat down and formulated a plan for finding my brother at his last known place of employment, the high school where he had been principal. I had so much to tell him.
    Taro was the only person left in my family, the only one who knew me, the real Shoko. We had our differences. What brother and sister didn’t? But sometimes I swore he could read my mind.
    That was all gone now. Taro had not spoken to me since I married Charlie, even though my father had endorsed the marriage. My brother hated Americans, and me as well, both for marrying an American and for other reasons I had long preferred not to think about. But fifty years was a long time to hold a grudge, even for someone who thought forgiveness was a weakness.
    Japanese culture is different from American. We do not forgive readily. Sometimes we accept, which is different from forgiveness. In cases like this, where I’d done something Taro thought was evil, the taint would cling to me forever.
    After the war, my father and I accepted the reality of the new Japan. Even after the way it ended.
    I remembered the afternoon in 1945,