Simon crosses Franklin keeping to the inside of the sidewalk, his hands thrust from view in his coat pockets while the buses and cars hiss through the slushy soup of snow on Third Avenue. He recognizes no one as he walks. No one looks at him. He searches them, their various faces, postures and strides. Most concentrate on the sidewalk or the curb with their chins welted down into their collars, their eyes purled against the cold. Simon looks for the familiar someone who can anchor him to the old lazy grid of the city, but distant enough not to know his crime or recognize the guilt he keeps knotted safely against his heart. But he finds no one in his neighborhood from the old days.

His hands find nothing in his pockets. Nothing he carries that can satisfy their aching grip, there is no loose change tumbling there in the linty nose of his pockets as the result of some humble or casual purchase. No lighter taken on purpose or by accident from the tabletop jumble of a raucous party. He has no keys to doors either past or present. His cold fingers do not close on an errant tube of lipstick held for a girlfriend whose new outfit harbors no pockets. None of the small things everyone on the street around him takes for granted. No torn movie ticket stubs or rubber bands from the morning paper. No grocery list scrawled on the back of a deposit slip or any other reminder of harmless domestic responsibility.

Simon passes the Third Avenue Market and a couple emerge with a brown paper bag of groceries that the woman carries in both arms like a baby. The man stalks ahead in the blue uniform of a delivery man, bus driver or mechanic. The woman is bundled against the cold so Simon can’t see her form very well. She takes mincing steps on the ice. Her man wears the weariness of a night’s work sliced into his forehead.

“Baby, wait up,” calls the woman. “Wait.”

The man marches ahead, daring the ice to make him slip.

“Wait honey. I’m sorry,” says the woman.

The man stops abruptly and cocks his head to the side in exasperation.

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” he says and lifts his eyes to nod at someone across the street.

“Okay, okay,” she says, resting the bag on her hip, “just wait up, okay?”

They move forward together and pass Simon. The man takes the bag from his girlfriend and Simon can hear him chuckle at something she says as they retreat into the distance.