I’d visited him once with Mama, when he first got the cart. He worked such long hours, leaving the house at 5 A.M. and returning late, that the two of us hardly saw him at all. I had a school holiday, so we decided to spend it seeing Baba in the daylight hours for a change. It took us almost an hour between walking to the subway station, waiting for the train, and then walking the three blocks to the corner where he worked. I remember marveling at how beautiful Center City looked, only a few blocks north of where we lived, but a different world entirely. We’d stood on the sidewalk, waiting to talk to him, but he had a dozen people in line, all in suits, checking their watches, calling out “Hold the mayo” and “Easy on the onions.” Baba finally blew us both kisses and opened his hands wide, apologetically, before wrapping a hot cheesesteak, dripping with fried onions, in aluminum foil. We walked back dejectedly toward the subway station, both of us too intensely disappointed to speak to one another on the ride home.