And the strange thing, the thing she would turn over afterward for years, was that she answered him honestly.
"I'm certain now," she said. "I wasn't always."
He did not ask what she meant. He just looked at her a moment longer, and then he took off his glasses, which had fogged in the steam, and wiped them on his maroon scarf, slowly, and put them back on. His hands were trembling, but they had been trembling since the bus stop.
"It's a beautiful name," he said. "I'm sorry. I once knew someone by it. It took me by surprise. The cold makes an old man foolish."
"It's okay," Harper said, and turned back to the onions, because they were starting to burn, and because she found she did not want him to see her face just then, though she could not have said why.
They ate at the kitchen table, the three of them, with Mrs. Wilk's second bag of pierogi joining the first, fried in butter until they were golden and crackling at the edges, and a bowl of kapusta that only Harper and Lucian ate, and cocoa with the marshmallows Roman had not gotten to pick, from the half-bag of stale ones in the cupboard. Mrs. Wilk herself came up the stairs at six-thirty with a plate of kolaczki dusted in powdered sugar and a bottle of Ballantine ale, which she set in front of Lucian without a word, and then stood with her arms folded inspecting him the way she inspected chickens at the Broadway Market. Lucian bore it with perfect courtesy, and thanked her for the ale in a sentence so graceful that she very nearly smiled. At last she patted him once on the shoulder, hard, the way you'd pat a horse, said to Harper in Polish, "He's all right. Watch the silverware anyway," and went back downstairs.
"She said Merry Christmas."
After supper Roman cleared the table without being asked, which was a miracle of its own, and then hovered by Lucian's chair with the particular restlessness of a child who wants something and is not sure he is allowed. Finally he said, "Can I see the radio?"
"Roman."
"It's all right," Lucian said. "It's only fair. You carried it." He nodded toward the living room, where Roman had set the blanket-wrapped bundle on the end of the sofa like a guest. "Bring it here, and we'll unwrap it together."
It was a Zenith table radio from the late 1940s, Harper guessed, the kind that had sat in every kitchen on her block when she was a girl: a curved cabinet of dark brown Bakelite, the color of root beer, with a round dial at the front marked off in numbers, a gold pointer, and two knobs like big buttons. There was a crack along one corner of the cabinet, mended long ago with something yellow that had dried and darkened. The cloth over the speaker grille was faded to the color of weak tea. Somebody had polished the Bakelite until it shone.