The yoga mom turns to the girl with the red backpack again. The girl seems embarrassed at being addressed, studying her bike’s handlebars, but the yoga mom does not notice this. The idiots they let send their kids to school here, she says. People who can’t afford insurance should ride the bus.

III

As she drives us down Wilshire, my mother is quiet and grips the steering wheel, her shoulders stressed because it is so high for her. Her brown makeup is shiny from sweat, and I resist an urge to tell her to pat it dry. Beyond her, sun flashes on the second floor of a parking garage, moving from car to car, glinting off hoods and chrome bumpers.

Where are we going? I say.

I need to pick some things up from the mall, she says, still sounding uptight as she turns to me. Is that okay?

A year ago, she would have pulled out a cigarette at this point, but she quit, and now she puts a knuckle to her mouth and chews at it. Tita Dina is always telling her this is not ladylike and she should stop.

I stare at the cupped hands in my lap.

Sure, I say.

We park out on a sunny garage roof. She remains quiet as we walk past the rows of hot clicking metal hoods and down the urine-smelling stairwell. On the sidewalk, she stops to put on her sunglasses. As I wait, I notice our reflection in a tinted window glass. Before the furniture display of slipcovered couches our reflection is ghostlike and faintly visible: a short Asian woman with a lanky teenager, one foot taller, standing amid people who swarm past.

She takes us down the Promenade, a crowded pedestrian street of fake cobblestones, towards one of the makeup shops she likes. Shoppers and tourists, couples and wanderers, come en masse from the opposite direction. The times I have been here with Tomas, people always step aside, even older men in suits with a girlfriend or secretary whom they reluctantly guide out of our way. But now my mother steps out of other people’s paths, and I do too. We near a group of skinny college-student types. They look like engineers, nerdy, and I would not normally get out of their way. But even though the pale one in a yellow button-down shirt sees Mom, he acts as if he does not notice her, and she actually has to squeeze beside a bench to let them pass. The biggest one clips her shoulder. I freeze. I glare at them, aware of the ice pick tucked behind my wallet, but they don’t even notice me.

She starts again and I hurry to catch up. In the past I might have walked a bit ahead, pretending not to be with her, but today I walk alongside.