Simon might have been walking back from the site. His legs cramped from crouching on the steel timbers, his back pinched from balancing on girders all day, his hands laced with splinters of metal that were invisible until marked with rubies of welling blood. He’d try to stand erect as he walked, strolling really, giving himself a slightly longer walk home, pacing himself on the uneven concrete. He’d light a cigarette as dusk settled down and squeezed out the remains of the day. People emerged from the portals of their working lives, hurrying for buses and taxis, cars pulled considerately to the curb. Simon could have been among them, slower, more deliberate than the current of people rippling around him, and she could have passed him on her way from Kresge’s, after buying herself a little something, a little anything to make her life more hers, to make herself more his. She might have passed him, a pretty white girl having just bought some lip gloss, used the test bottles of perfume, a necklace to crest her collarbones like submerged wings, on her way to the house of the Indian boy she’d met the other day.

And it was the smell, perhaps. Her new perfume could have brought her into his ken, to give up his bird’s-eye perspective in the steel ribs of the building where he perched like a gargoyle come to life. The smell of her as she brushed past him. He smoked his cigarette and imagined looking after her as she walked ahead of him down the sidewalk, her arms crossed under her breasts and her ankles slim in their sagging socks, a schoolgirl’s posture. Later, after she became a regular fixture in their house, he would try to pick her out from the crowd—brownish hair, her birdbone wrists, the down on her ears. Simon would try to find her on the street from the vantage of the building. If only he could have seen her sooner, with her head bent from girlish shyness instead of womanly isolation. If he’d seen her from above, or grabbed her arm, just for the smell of her as she passed him, things might have been different. If he had done this sooner, sooner than his brother, before she noticed the swelling of her belly, then all of their lives would have been different. Secrets would not have been possible. But he didn’t; he just smoked and she hurried by, and then he forgot her, and finished his cigarette as he passed over the freeway on Third Avenue, and entered the Southside. His back and legs slowly unfolding, sloughing off the stiffness and pain acquired from the day’s work.