Since Split’s death Simon has taken to following Vera. He has learned her schedule, the odd hours she keeps at the jewelry store that specializes in electroplated gold and zircon. Jewelry made to suggest wealth but sold mostly to status-driven gangsters and businessmen who buy the fakes for their wives and the real thing for their lovers. Their lovers have made the receipt of these gifts a supplementary income. They know it is only a matter of time before they move up or down the IDS Tower, or out to the one-level complexes in the suburbs where a new boss or partner will begin with lunch and graduate up to late nights and then to drinks, bed, sex, guilt, and another set of earrings. Earrings are always the last choice because they snag on sweaters and wedge in car seats like ticks to be found at the worst times—during family picnics, high school graduation receptions, spring cleanings, or promotion parties. So the devious and wise stick to necklaces, bracelets and lingerie, things that can be hidden, dismantled, but easily found.

Simon knows Vera’s schedule and when he finishes his work at the Curtis he follows her a little farther each day, creeping steadily closer to where she crosses the freeway to the Northside. He is still timid in this exercise, still reluctant to follow her all the way, yet he feels he must. He has monitored her stride and carriage, her habits, but he has not seen her at rest. He has not caught her standing still or sitting, and so he cannot fully read her yet. He needs to study her stillness like a picture to accurately gauge the magnitude of her loss. He lags a full block behind in the army coat he got from the Salvation Army, with a copy of Oui or High Society he’s borrowed from Dougan rolled damply in the flap pocket. Afterward he usually reads under the Third Avenue Bridge.

It is April and rainy. Killing weather, his father used to say. Killing weather, when the ducks came in low, their wings too heavy with water to sustain flight, and the deer moved slowly, feeding cautiously, released from the confines of winter. The rain hushed movement and smell as Jacob shook Simon awake before dawn and they crept out of the cabin to pole through the flooded swamps springing mallards and teal.