The work site was littered with cement mixers and stray two-by-fours. The trailers where the foremen and architects hassled out the logistics of the new building sat like crusted biscuit tins. Lightly rusted H-beam and steel cable were mounded here and there. The ground where the Crystal Court would be was a level of sand studded with jagged beam ends.

“Watch your step,” said Simon as he took the lead again and threaded his way through the equipment to the base of the tower, just a frame of girders with only the steel subflooring riveted on the first fifteen floors. He opened the mesh door to the lift and handed out two hard hats reserved for visiting city officials. Lester took them and lowered one onto Vera’s head. The plastic webbing was too large and she had to tilt her chin up to see, the same way she used to try on her mother’s Old World hats. Her family didn’t go to temple or observe any of the holidays. Her parents only went to weddings, funerals, bar and bat mitzvahs, her father out of neighborhood solidarity, her mother to dress up. Her father always looked stiff and uncomfortable, awkward in the unforgiving wool. He was more comfortable in his canvas overalls with his head under the sink fixing a leak or bent over someone else’s car. We are unionists, he’d say. We don’t need religion. We don’t need holidays, he’d say with vehemence. Though he got a Christmas tree every year and gathered quietly with his friends to drink beer and toast the dead on May Day.

Lester put on the hard hat, and they all got on the shaky lift. Simon closed the door, asked Ready? and thumbed the switch. With a jerk they started skyward. With his legs apart and his arms crossed, rocking slightly as the lift banged its way up, Simon stood like the captain of a ship on moderate seas. Lester held on to the mesh with a clawed hand and took long pulls off the Thunderbird with the other. He grinned at Vera, who shivered between them. The mesh grate diced the view, and without perspective the city lights were just lights that blinked steadily through the metal. Lester handed her the bottle and she drank carefully, but the motion of the lift sloshed the wine and it spilled down the front of her jacket. They all laughed. The farther up they got, the more relaxed Simon appeared to be. He seemed at home in the bare structure of what was going to be the tallest building in Minneapolis, the second tallest in the Midwest.

“What do you do up here, Simon?”