In front of the shutter, with his back half turned to the camera, stood a slight silver-haired man in a plain gray jacket and rimless glasses. His hands were folded behind his back. He was not looking at whoever was taking the picture. He was looking at the shutter.
Amara sat up in bed and looked at it for a long time, in the dark, with the foghorn going.
Then, a minute later, the phone buzzed again. A second photograph.
* * *
It showed a living room. Bright and cluttered, with a television on in the corner and a pharmacy calendar on the wall and stacks of newspapers, and a red paper lantern hanging from a hook in the ceiling. A gray cat was asleep on a kitchen chair.
In the middle of the room, in a heavy armchair, sat a tiny old woman. She had a cloud of white hair and a face like a dried apple and a pair of enormous pink plastic glasses, and she was wearing a purple silk jacket buttoned to the neck, very formal, and she had a wooden cane laid across her knees. She was glaring at someone off to the side of the camera with an expression of the deepest suspicion.
Perched on the arm of her chair, with one hand resting lightly on her shoulder, was Lin Weiguo. He was smiling.
The message came a moment later. In Mandarin.
Her son gave me the address. When I told her who I was, she asked me how much money I had. When I told her, she said it was too much money for one man and asked if I was a criminal. Then she beat me at mahjong three times. She asked me to tell you that you are too thin and that you should come home. I have now told you. Also, she cheats at mahjong.
Amara laughed out loud, alone, in the dark, at four in the morning, in her studio apartment in Daly City. She laughed so hard she had to put the phone down. And then, quite suddenly and without any warning at all, she was crying, really crying, for the first time since the morning in October when she had read Carl's two lines, and perhaps for the first time in much longer than that.
When she could see the screen again she typed a reply, in Mandarin.
I know she does. She taught me how.
* * *
On the second Monday in May, Lin Weiguo came back to Fremont.
He came with Fang Lihua, who had never gone home and had extended her stay twice, and with Zhou Jian and his notebook, and with Huang Bo, who had flown in from Shenzhen the night before especially and had made Teddy Marchetti very happy by booking a table for dinner that evening and requesting the black cod.
He walked the factory floor with Bradley Kincaid for four hours.
Amara was not there. She was in Monterey, in a small soundproof booth in a basement of the Middlebury Institute, taking her final exams. She heard about it that night, on the phone, from Tomás Herrera, whose voice kept breaking.
The coating line was running at full speed. The new ovens, which Tomás and Fang had designed together over a winter of sixteen-hour days and Sunday tamales, ran thirty percent longer than the old ones, and the coating came out of the end of them smooth and even and flat, yard after yard of dark shining ribbon. Over the past thirty days, the defect rate on the line had been two point four percent.
And Lin had walked the floor, slowly, the way he walked everywhere, and he had pointed.
At a woman on cell assembly in a blue smock and hairnet. "Maribel Santos," Bradley had said. "Cell assembly, three years. Two kids, seven and four. She commutes from Tracy. Her husband drives for UPS."
At an old man pushing a wide broom along the yellow line by the loading doors. "Earl Washington. He was a security guard here back when this building was a Sears warehouse, in the seventies. When they closed it he stayed on with the new owners, and the next ones, and us. He's eighty-one. He knows every pipe in the building. If something leaks, you ask Earl."
At a young man at the slurry mixers. "Danny Nguyen. He pulled my hand out of mixer number two on my third day. I owe him a thumb."
At a woman on the coating line, with a photograph of a young sailor taped to the side of her toolbox. "Guadalupe Reyes. Her son Mateo is on the Abraham Lincoln. He comes home in July."
And on, and on, down the lines and across the floor, for four hours. Lin pointed and Bradley named. Not once did he hesitate. Not once did he get one wrong.
At the end, Lin came to the head of the coating line, where Tomás was standing by the mixing tanks with his arms folded, exactly where he had stood on that morning in October. Lin pointed at him.
Bradley looked at Tomás for a long moment.
"Tomás Herrera," he said. "He was right."
Lin had shaken both of their hands. And then he had said, in English, so everyone on the line could hear: "The deal is on."
* * *
Amara graduated at the end of May with a Master of Arts in Conference Interpreting, English and Chinese, with distinction.
The ceremony was held outdoors, on a lawn above Monterey Bay, under a white tent, in a brisk wind that kept trying to steal everyone's mortarboard. Teddy Marchetti sat in the third row, in a three-piece suit he had bought for the occasion, and cried from the moment the procession started until the last name was read, and told everyone around him that it was the wind. Mei sat beside him in a black dress, with her arms folded and her chin up, and did not cry, and clapped harder than anyone else in the tent when Amara's name was called. Rosie Delgado had come, and her husband, and one of her grandchildren, who fell asleep. And Kenji had borrowed his cousin's car and driven down from the city at six in the morning, and gotten lost twice, and arrived just as the procession began, out of breath, in a borrowed tie.