Simon crosses the street lined with cars that hulk in the morning cold, ice welded to the mud flaps. Even now, when Simon looks at objects bigger than himself, he seeks out their center, calculating what it would take to balance them spinning through the air, where the cables could be clipped and on what the nylon webbing could rest to hoist it, passed like a puzzle high over the city. After ten years of not being allowed to lift anything heavier than a sack of potatoes or hold any tool that had heft or edge he is still building skyscrapers.

He passes the cars and skips over the snow-crusted curb and looks with sudden shock next door. The other houses have disappeared, replaced with two poorly constructed apartment buildings, each a study in how to charge more for less.

He shakes his head and mounts the sagging wooden steps. He pauses, not sure anymore of the etiquette of visiting, the choreography of knocking and waiting, of entering someone else’s space. He stands poised, knuckles raised. He is spared when she opens the door, sensing him there, wanting him to do it, to close the distance of ten years and his brother’s blood. Three inches between flesh and wood, ten years between touch. She opens the door and steps forward so now she is what he will have to step through to enter the house.

“Simon,” she says. Her voice speculative. She could have pointed beyond the fringe of brick buildings over the skyline and said Cloud or Orange. She doesn’t move.

“Ma,” he says.

She moves back a step, her hand on the doorknob.

“Ma. You look good.”

She smiles a little and turns. She isn’t prepared for this. She does not expect the soft humor the boys have inherited from their father. They were never much for loudness in either anger or love.

“Don’t lie straight off,” she says.

She leaves the door open and slides farther back. He raises his foot over the metal-cased step and sets it inside the house, his weight still cocked onto his back leg.