Watchers

style, Travis knew she would wear it because she did, indeed, love the dog.
    Perhaps Einstein could not read the words on the shirt, but he seemed to understand what was meant. When they came out of the shop and unhooked his leash from the parking meter where they’d tethered him, Einstein regarded the message on the shirt solemnly while Nora held it up for his inspection, then happily licked and nuzzled her.
    The day held only one bad moment for them. As they turned a corner and approached another shop window, Nora stopped suddenly and looked around at the crowds on the sidewalks—people eating ice cream in big homemade waffle-cookie cones, people eating apple tarts wrapped in wax paper, guys in feather-decorated cowboy hats they’d bought in one of the stores, pretty young girls in short-shorts and halters, a very fat woman in a yellow muumuu, people speaking English and Spanish and Japanese and Vietnamese and all the other languages YOU could hear at any Southern California tourist spot—and then she looked along the busy street at a gift shop built in the form of a three-story stone-and-timber windmill, and she stiffened, looked stricken. Travis had to guide her to a bench in a small park, where she sat trembling for a few minutes before she could even tell him what was wrong.
    “Overload,” she said at last, her voice shaky. “So many . . . new sights . . . new sounds . . . so many different things all at once. I’m so sorry.”
    “It’s all right,” he said, touched.
    “I’m used to a few rooms, familiar things. Are people staring?”
    “No one’s noticed anything. There’s nothing to stare at.”
    She sat with her shoulders hunched, her head hung forward, her hands fisted in her lap—until Einstein put his head on her knees. As she petted the dog, she began gradually to relax.
    “I was enjoying myself,” she said to Travis, though she did not raise her head, “really enjoying myself, and I thought how far from home I was, how wonderfully far from home—”
    “Not realty. Less than an hour’s drive,” he assured her.
    “A long, long way,” she said.
    Travis supposed that for her it was, in fact, a great distance.
    She said, “And when I realized how far from home I was and how .. . different everything was . . . I clenched up, afraid, like a child.”
    “Would you like to go back to Santa Barbara now?”
    “No!” she said, meeting his eyes at last. She shook her head. She dared to look around at the people moving through the small park and at the gift shop shaped like a windmill. “No. I want to stay a while. All day. I want to have dinner in a restaurant here, not at a sidewalk café but inside, like other people do, inside, and then I want to go home after dark.” She blinked and repeated those two words wonderingly, “After dark.”
    “All right.”
    “Unless, of course, you hoped to get back sooner.”
    “No, no,” he said. “I planned on making a day of it.”
    “This is very kind of you.”
    Travis raised one eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
    “You know.”
    “I’m afraid I don’t.”
    “Helping me step out into the world,” she said. “Giving up your time to help someone . . . like me. It’s very generous of you.”
    He was astonished. “Nora, let me assure you, it’s not charity work I’m involved in here!”
    “I’m sure a man like you has better things to do with a Sunday afternoon in May.”
    “Oh, yes,” he said self-mockingly, “I could have stayed home and given all my shoes a meticulous shining with a toothbrush. Could have counted the number of pieces in a box of elbow macaroni.”
    She stared at him in disbelief.
    “By God, you’re serious,” Travis said. “You think I’m here just because I’ve taken pity on you.”
    She bit her lip and said, “It’s all right.” She looked down at the dog again. “I don’t mind.”
    “But I’m not here out of pity, for God’s sake! I’m here because I like being with you, I really do, I like you very much.”
    Even with her head lowered, the blush that crept into her cheeks was visible.
    For a while neither of them spoke.
    Einstein looked up at her adoringly as she petted him, though once in a while he rolled his eyes at Travis as if to say, All right, you’ve opened the door of a relationship, so don’t just sit there like a fool, say something, move forward, win her over.
    She scratched the retriever’s ears and stroked him for a couple of minutes, and then she said, “I’m okay