"I know," she said, and heard herself, and laughed despite everything.
VI.
They came.
By a quarter to eight on Wednesday, the twenty-third of December, the rotunda was full: all sixty-one, the receiving crew in hi-vis vests, the tearoom cooks in whites, Oge in her coat four hours after her shift had ended. And more. Lucjan had spent two days in the Shop with a 1990s staff directory and a magnifying glass, calling every retiree who still answered a landline, and twenty-three of them came, some with canes. One came in a wheelchair pushed by a granddaughter: Teodora Wiśniewska, ninety-one, who had worked Gloves from 1954 to 1989 and had been one of the salesgirls in that lunchroom, and remembered Benedek as "a skinny boy with a beautiful coat he never took off."
No one told them how to arrange themselves. They stood in a loose ring around the pyramid, among the gift boxes and little lit trees, the way people stand around a fire. Elliot stood at the back by the tall windows with his hands in his pockets. He had driven up from Chicago at five. She had not asked him to, or not to.
Roz read the letter once more and then told them everything: the two numbers and the gap; the sixty thousand she'd found in two days from a bank, two foundations, and a councilman, which was not nothing and not enough; the clause; the fifteenth; Corinne's sentence about objections.
"So you can tell the museum it goes to Chicago, on terms you agree on, and the fund is whole. Or you keep it — the library might take it for this room — and the fund is two-thirds. Or something I haven't thought of, which is likeliest, because there are eighty-four of you and one of me." She took a breath. "For six years I thought taking care of this place meant deciding everything myself. He was right and I was wrong. So I'm going to stop talking."
For a long time no one spoke.
Then Ferdie Lutz, because someone always has to and he had been doing it since the Reagan administration. He was sixty-four and bald and wore a three-piece suit to sell shoes.
"I want to keep it. My kids grew up coming to see it. Let it stay on Wisconsin Avenue where he built it, not in a glass box with a little card. I'll take less. I've got my wife's pension. I'll take less."
Murmurs; some retirees nodded.
"You'll take less," said Marisol Quiñones. She stood near the front in her good black coat, and everyone could hear what it cost her to keep her voice level. "That's great, Ferdie. I mean it. I can't. I'm saying it out loud because somebody has to, and I'm not going to be ashamed in front of a bunch of wooden soldiers. I have a kid and a lease through August. I start nursing school in January, and the plan was the severance carries us to summer. Two-thirds of a plan isn't a plan. It's me working nights at Walgreens and dropping out by March." She lifted her chin. "And I don't think he'd mind. The man in the letter. People fed him so he could make it to his first paycheck. That's all I'm asking. My first paycheck."
Ferdie looked at the floor. Then at her, and nodded slowly, the way a man nods when someone younger than his daughter has told him something true.
"That's fair, kid," he said. "Yeah. That's fair."
Other voices followed. Bashir from the tearoom asked whether the museum might pay in installments so it could stay longer; Roz said the board had been clear. Someone proposed crowdfunding; someone else pointed out, gently, that it would have to raise three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in twenty-three days over the holidays. The talk went round and round the pyramid the way the pyramid was meant to, and got nowhere, and Roz kept her mouth shut, and it was the hardest thing she had done in six years.