However, since the spirits have their ways, and fate has yet to be cheated, the girls and young woman missed one another in the amount of time it would have taken Sher to sprint thirty-eight sections of Portland cement sidewalk laid fifty years earlier by Lithuanian scabs, who merely stared at the throngs of German and Swedish day laborers, hurling insults at them in English, German, and Swedish, but not Lithuanian, Russian, or Polish, the languages they spoke. The Lithuanians mixed, measured, spread, and evened the concrete block after block, unsure why the Americans, who spoke multiple languages, screamed and marched around them as they worked; unsure why they stomped, spit, and tossed rocks at their heads and into the wet cement. And then, every Friday, the Lithuanians collected their p
