She sits in the front, but over by the far door, clutching her purse that lays between us. She absently regards the stores we pass, a deli, a New Age tea place, a florist shop fronted by white buckets of bright flowers, the Asian man who owns it gathering stems for a young guy who wears an earring and black vest. Mom likes such flowers, and we could pass here on the way back, when I could buy her some for the yellow table vase in the kitchen. I plan to do this. Mass is dim and quiet and afterwards she moves to the pews near the Virgin, lighting a candle at her feet and kneeling before her to pray. I drive her home on a route that will take us by the same flower shop. But as we near, she is faced away, the back of her padded shoulder pointed at me, and stopping at the shop suddenly seems like a foolish idea. I drive us past it without stopping.

Chapter Three

I

Lately, he has been leaving me alone, ever since I started doing things to begin paying back for the car and Buster.

He has been especially nice ever since we went down to Eddy Ho’s. Since then he has not beaten or picked on me in front of his friends, though if he is in a bad mood at home you have to avoid him because he gets snappy. A couple of times he has even taken me with him to hang out—not just on jobs, like he used to. Twice we went to see some friends who live in their own house in Mar Vista, and once to a girlfriend’s Santa Monica apartment. Her mother is only thirty-two and likes to go dancing, so they have the place to themselves most of the time. People hang out there, kids their age—several years older than me—sitting around the living room taking bong hits, watching TV, while couples sit almost on top of each other on the couch. Everyone listens to one another tell stories. Tomas has a friend, Manny, who he went with down to Crenshaw on the second day of the LA riots. They set fire to a house, claims Manny, and passed through a boulevard of burning palm trees. Then they went down to a Price Club and walked out with boxes of new TV sets and stereos. That they went down was news to me. There were older guys in their thirties doing the same thing in Polo shirts, and their girlfriends would be waiting in their Camrys and Acuras. No cops interfered. The atmosphere was so lawless, a camera crew from some local news station was able to film all this without fazing the older guys. Tomas and Manny, though, were too smart to get on film.