I wonder if the dogs can see our reflections in the rapidly passing glass, in mirrored and tinted storefronts. In these reflections I can make out Tomas, me, and the dogs—just barely—and it looks as though they are looking at me, but I doubt they can see anything. They cannot even see the images on a television screen.

II

We stop at the Brentwood Country Mart and have the cheese pizzas we used to come for with our mother each time we visited our Tita Dina, who lives close by. It is strange how they have this covered courtyard with benches surrounding a tree; it feels somehow rustic, even though we are in the middle of a great urban city, and the people who frequent it are rich and mostly Jewish, from Brentwood Park. Daylight floods in pleasantly and we have always loved sitting here, but it seems sad without our mother this time. Tomas buys the pieces and folds mine over like a taco for me, the New York way our father showed us, then he gets some fries from the chicken stand and brings out the little cups of barbecue sauce they have that we always loved to dip them in, and he shakes the garlic salt seasoning on.

Dig in, he says, and folds his own piece over.

A few people watch us eat. Probably they are taking note of Tomas. A fortyish woman in slender black bicycle pants and a pink T-shirt. An older woman I recognize who works at the toy store. The wetback behind the pizza counter who spoke a few words of Spanish to my brother. Tomas did not understand the Spanish, though he nodded and tried to make it look as if he understood. I wonder if Tomas senses all this attention as he hunches over his piece. Probably he does, though he pretends not to, or at least not to care. In those days when we came with our mother or aunt nobody ever paid any attention to us, except at the toy store where they knew us, or the market where we bought chocolates, and the bookstore where Tomas used to read magazines and talk to the old skinny man who ran it and smelled like shoe polish and who would recommend to him all the Michener books my brother loved because they would take you to faraway places. Even after he stopped reading them, I would scour his old copies and buy the latest books. The same skinny old man still works there; he looks the same, but didn’t recognize us walking in. He watched Tomas carefully as he paused to look over a few magazines and then told him not to look unless he was going to buy one. Tomas crumpled the one he was reading back into its slot and made his way to order our pizza.