In fact, for several minutes she’d been aware of the man at a little distance, regarding her curiously, a vague figure, as in those old fake photographs of ectoplasm, hovering in the corner of her eye, which she might acknowledge or ignore. This figure, this person, staring toward her with a certain intensity—avidity, hunger—as she stood leaning her arms on the railing and gazing toward the farther shore (Windsor, Ontario: Canada). Listening to the sullied waves of the Detroit River lapping against the concrete embankment, loud and sharp, like hands rudely clapped.

Not clear if the man in the stained clothing was looking at a (lone) woman on the walkway who happened to be L.K. or if indeed he was looking specifically, with interest, at her.

Thinking—Does he know me? Do I know him? Please, no.

Well, too late. Politely she finds herself smiling. Politely lifts her eyes toward his but takes care not to actually engage with him.

Her impression is: a genial, creased face, round as a sunflower.

Jaws covered in a coarse gray stubble. Deep lines bracketing his mouth from smiling too frequently.

And he is tall, looming. Might be a former athlete going soft in middle age. Still-muscled shoulders, upper arms. Reminds her of—who?—the Chinese dissident-artist Ai Weiwei? She smiles to think of Weiwei: a courageous artist whom she much admires.

On this man’s big head a soiled baseball cap, slouched sideways. Graying-brown hair straggling out from beneath. A glinting-gold stud the size of a dime in his left earlobe.

On his enormous (size twelve) feet he is wearing hand-tooled leather sandals, of high quality but stained; sandals that betray big, splayed naked toes, misshapen and discolored toenails. If he were a husband or a lover of hers, she would wince to see such toes, such toenails, exposed in a public place.

A wave almost of faintness sweeps over her. Sees herself seated, and the thickset smiling man beside her in such a way that his feet, his big, naked, heavy feet, are in her lap … Is she trimming the toenails? Is that a small nail clipper in her fingers?

Certainly, this man is a stranger. L.K. has never seen him before, despite the air of familiarity about him. Unless …

She’d lived in Detroit for a tumultuous eleven years when she was a young woman and a young wife, and now she is returning after many years. How very many, she has not allowed herself to calculate.

Not a triumphant visit. Yet not an aggrieved or repentant visit.

Well, a necessary visit. An old, once-beloved friend who lives now in nearby Grosse Pointe, terminally ill.