Now when the winds roar outside on hot Santa Ana nights, rustling through the dry brittle leaves and branches, on nights when your hair feels staticy against your pillow and your legs sparkle beneath the sheets in the dark while the window rattles in its pane, Mom has a special pork biscuit to entice Buster away from the windows. The dog thinks she hears animals and prowlers out there, her nose pressed to the glass, though it is only branches clattering in the trees. If our mother feeds her enough, Buster sleeps on her bed and keeps her company.

V

She has gotten used to seeing the dogs throw themselves at Tomas in front of clients. But today she is especially nervous because she expects Tita Dina and my cousin Matt for lunch. She has already patted on her makeup and used curlers to make her hair ends curl off her face, as though she were going to work. She imagines Tita Dina might think she is not the best mother.

She turns off the faucet and comes up to me where I am sitting at the Formica counter reading a magazine. Gabe, she says.

Yeah?

When will your brother be finished with this man?

I don’t know.

Will it be in an hour?

I don’t know.

She looks at me. Will you ask him?

Why don’t you ask him? I say. I do not like to nag my brother because you never know how he might respond. Also, it was my brother’s idea to invite them over in the first place. He wants to ask our cousin Matt if he knows any movie people who might want to buy dogs. Matt went to a private high school founded by Episcopalian hippies. He teaches there now, and movie people pay a lot of money to send their kids there. Our mother does not know I am worried about annoying Tomas, and she looks at me as though I were lazy and ungrateful.

It’s just one little favor I’m asking.

Okay, I’ll do it.

Just one little favor.

I said I would do it, Mom.

She stands there and shakes her head.

Okay.

Lately she has begun talking about moving back to the Philippines to grow old, because she has no husband to take care of her and American children put their mothers in nursing homes. We tell her we will not, but she says American wives would not have an old Asian lady living with them. Tomas says he would smack any bitch who treated her badly. Still, our mother likes to run down a list of cousins and nephews and other distant relatives who live in the Philippines and she wonders out loud whether she should call up and ask for a visit.