Simon tries to match his long strides with her speedy tick, he stoops over to reduce the distance between them. He’s forgotten how short she is. She’d been so slight, so small, all legs and arms, with dancer’s breasts. While he was in prison he remembered her as looming, as solid, wrapped around him, holding his head against her chest, the smell of her sweet and strong. She slows and relaxes into her stride, and so, despite the rain and cold, despite his stored grief and her hoarded rage, they begin to stroll.

This was how he’d imagined prison while he waited for sentencing in Hennepin County Jail. He’d imagined slate-gray rainy days and unexpected visitors, even Vera, and a stroll in the yard tinged with remorse and delicate sadness. He had imagined himself afterward, taking slow walks like a weary zoo animal that knows the margins of steel and stone.

But no one had come to see him. His time in the yard had always been tense, spent negotiating the other islands of men. Visits took place across Plexiglas and after the public defender came to tell him there would be no appeal, no one else came. The lawyer was fresh from some second-rate law school and full of the soft enthusiasm of those who expect power to grow from privilege, and who talked with his lawyer friends about “doing some good” over Heinekens at upscale sports bars. He looked guilty and hotly ashamed when he told Simon that there would be no second chance, but banged his pink fist against the table and said that he’d fight it. Simon could see he was horrified, itchy to get free of him. Simon suspects his case was not what the lawyer had imagined. He would rather defend an innocent darkie who’d been beaten up by the police, or a single mother and her children who’d been unfairly evicted by their white landlord. He had not come back.

“You been following your mom, too?” Vera doesn’t look at him.

“I dropped by.”

“Feel different bein out?”

Simon shrugs, “It just feels bigger, that’s all.”

“You look the same,” she says, looking at him now.

“Why’d you leave Lincoln at Ma’s house?”

“Don’t even expect me to answer you; I don’t have to answer you. You,” she says, her voice rising.

“I was just wondering.”

“Well, don’t. You lost the right to ask.”

Simon fumbles with a cigarette and busies himself lighting it.

“You still live with your folks?”

“You kidding? I live down the street from the old house, but they moved out to Saint Louis Park. Up and out.”