Even then the party seemed endless. All she wanted was to sneak away with Lester to his room where they could talk and touch each other. But they were chained to Simon, and had to rise with his exuberance, fall with his hidden sorrows.

All this is mercilessly fresh. Finally, after helping Simon with half a bottle, Lester told him Vera was pregnant.

How Simon had roared when he found out. He kept yelling—You fuck everything up! You fuck it all up!

“Easy, Si,” said Lester. “Easy, man. It ain’t the end of the world.”

Simon’s body tensed. “You don’t know shit. Who takes care of you? Who takes care of all a you?”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“You’re too dumb to figure it out.”

He seemed to calm down as he grabbed the shovel standing inside the door. He leaned on it like a crutch. Lester breathed and tried to joke the tension out of Simon. “Whatcha gonna do? Brain me with a shovel?”

Simon picked it up and took one step toward Lester.

“That’s what I’m gonna do!” he said. The steel and skull and “that’s” all met at the same time. Lester fell.

“That’s what!” Again.

“That’s what!” For the last time, the shovel raised so far above his head it scraped the ceiling. And he was done, and they saw Lester’s face was gone and his legs were jerking and then he was dead.

Vera held Simon until the police came. He sobbed into the breasts she had shown to Lester before the party started. “See,” she’d said, “they’re bigger.” She held him against those breasts, so firm and perfect and ready to help. She held Simon as he cried.

“What happened? What happened?” he kept mumbling.

She remembers saying, but can’t imagine how she did it, “You killed your brother, Simon.”

“Did I?”

“You killed him, Simon.”

She said it softly, as if reassuring him. Soothing him with the fact that the worst had come to pass. All the while, she stroked his hair and wondered how a shovel got into the house in the summer.

So it couldn’t have been Lester on the street. She takes one last look as she nears the top of the overpass. Nothing. The water is choked with ice. Deadheads collect in the wire mesh of the docks at Saint Anthony. She crosses over to the Northside.

She doesn’t want to admit the other possibility: that she has seen her son. The son she took to Betty’s and left there because it hurt too much to look at him every day. The son she dropped at Betty’s while she was still nursing so that her breasts grew, stretched tight and ached every moment until she went to the hospital and demanded they give her a shot to dry them up.