“Only a thick pane of glass and a sidewalk away, she's been glancing back at me - isn't she? - as she talks to a gray-haired man with a luxury car. She's huskier than him, a few inches taller, and as dramatic and endowed as fantasy: it's her red dress and wavy black hair and a blue, cloudless sky, as Mexican as cheap paint, that halos her, and a nasty kink in her eyes which I can see even at this distance.
She is sitting across the booth I'm in. Her name is Mayela.”