"To the boats," Lucian repeated. His voice was very even.
"The freighters on the lakes. The ore boats and the grain boats. All those men out on Lake Erie and Lake Superior in the middle of the night, and their families would write in to the station, or call, and he'd read the messages on the air. 'To the crew of the Armco, from Mrs. Ryba on Kosciuszko Street, the baby has a tooth.' 'To the second cook on the Joseph H. Frantz, from your sister in Riverside, the furnace is fixed.' Like that. 'Your mother's out of the hospital and asking for you.' 'The Bills lost again.' 'We miss you, come home safe.' And he'd say the weather on the lakes. Wind southwest twenty knots, waves four to six feet. I didn't know what any of it meant. I just liked the way he said it. He made it sound like everybody out there in the dark was all right as long as he kept talking." She was quiet a moment. "And every night when he signed off he'd say the same thing. 'This is Harper, on the Harbor Light. Keep a lamp in the window. Goodnight, Buffalo. Goodnight, lakes.'"
The radiator clanked. On the television, silently, a weatherman was pointing to Lake Erie.
"I used to say it with him," Harper said. "Under the covers. 'Goodnight, Buffalo. Goodnight, lakes.' And then I could sleep. Not before. Every night for, I don't know. Five years? Six? It went off the air when I was fourteen. One night it just wasn't there. There was a rock-and-roll station on twelve-seventy and a man screaming about a car dealership in Tonawanda, and I sat there with the radio and I cried like somebody had died, which my father thought was the stupidest thing he'd ever seen in his life." She laughed a little. "He wasn't wrong. It was a little stupid."
"It wasn't stupid," Lucian said. It came out rough, and he cleared his throat.
"Anyway. When I was eighteen I went downtown to the county courthouse on Delaware and I paid the fee and I changed my name. My first name. I kept Mazur. I don't know, I couldn't explain it then and I'm not sure I can explain it now. Agnieszka was the scared girl in the bed. Harper was—" She stopped. "Harper was the one keeping the light on. I wanted to be that one. So I just. Took it."
"And your father?"
"My father hasn't forgiven me. It was his mother's name. Agnieszka. He thought I was saying something about her, about him, about all of it. About being Polish, about Hertel Avenue. I wasn't. Or maybe I was. I was eighteen." She finished the brandy. "We had a big fight about it at Wigilia that year, Christmas Eve dinner, with the whole family there and the empty plate set for the stranger and everything, and I walked out before the poppy-seed cake, and that was more or less that. He comes to see Roman sometimes, at Easter. He sends a card with five dollars in it. He calls me Aggie on the envelope. He got laid off from the plant this year when they shut down the bar mill. I heard that from my cousin. Not from him."
She set the empty glass on the end table and looked at Lucian, who was holding his full glass in both hands, looking down into it as though there were something at the bottom.
"So when you asked if I was certain," she said, "I thought: nobody has ever asked me that. Everybody either thinks it's a nice name or they think I'm putting on airs. Nobody ever asked me if I was sure."
"And you're sure."