"I know exactly what it is." He looked around the kitchen, slowly, like a man in a museum: at the calendar from Erie County Savings Bank with the picture of the Kensington Expressway in snow, at the Bills schedule stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a pierogi, at Roman's drawings of Christmas ornaments taped crooked to the cupboard doors, at the Panasonic tape recorder sitting on the counter beside the bread box with its little microphone coiled on top like a sleeping snake. His eyes rested on the tape recorder a moment longer than on anything else.
"I haven't introduced myself," he said. "Forgive me. My mother would be ashamed. I'm Lucian Zeller."
"Lucian," Roman repeated, tasting it. "Like Lucy."
"Exactly like Lucy, but taller." He held out his hand to the boy, gravely, and Roman shook it, gravely. "And you are?"
"Roman Mazur. I'm nine. My birthday's in March."
"A fine month. Lions and lambs." He turned to Harper, who was at the stove with the spatula, her back half to him. "And I owe my life, I think, to Mrs. Mazur. If you'll let me call you that."
"You can call me Harper," she said. "Everybody does."
There was a silence behind her. It went on long enough that she turned around.
He was sitting very straight in the chair, his feet still in the dishpan, his hands flat on the oilcloth on either side of the mug she'd put there. He was looking at her as if she had said something in a language he had once known well and had not heard in many years. The color, which had been coming slowly back into his face, had gone out of it again.
"Harper?" he said. And then, quietly, carefully, like a man testing ice: "Are you certain?"
It was a strange question. It should have struck her as rude, or crazy, or both, and some part of her registered that it was both, and that she had brought a stranger into her kitchen on Christmas Eve on the strength of his voice and his polished shoes and the radio in his arms, and that perhaps he was not as all right as he seemed. But it did not feel rude, the way he asked it. It felt like he truly needed to know.