"With respect," he said, "I'm not going to sit alone in a stranger's flat on Christmas Eve while she drives off into a blizzard with a nine-year-old boy. I've had a very trying day, Mrs. Mazur, but I'm not yet as useless as all that." He straightened himself in the doorway. "I'll come with you. I can watch the boy. I can make coffee; I've made coffee in some very poor conditions. I can sit in a corner and be quiet; I've been practicing for two years." He paused. "And I'd like to see you work," he said. "If you'll let me. I'd like that very much."
She looked at him. She thought about saying no. She thought about the bus shelter, and the blue tinge to his lips, and his frozen oxfords drying by the radiator, stuffed with newspaper.
"Your shoes are wet," she said.
"Then lend me your father's boots," he said. "You seem to have kept everything else of his."
Her father's galoshes were in the hall closet, behind the vacuum, where they had been since the Easter he'd worn them up the stairs and forgotten them: black rubber buckle overshoes, size eleven, the kind every man in Lackawanna wore over his work boots in winter. Lucian put them on over two pairs of socks and buckled them with great ceremony, and looked down at them, and said, "I feel I should be inspecting a mine."
Harper carried Roman down the outside stairs wrapped in his comforter, the one with the Star Wars pattern, his boots in her free hand. He woke up halfway down and said, "Are we going to Grandpa's?" in a voice thick with sleep, which stopped her for a second on the icy step, because he had not asked to go to his grandfather's in more than a year.
"No, baby. We're going to work."
"Okay," he said, satisfied, and went back to sleep against her neck.
The Country Squire started on the third try. The streets were a white canyon. Niagara Street had been plowed once, hours ago, and was now a single rutted lane between drifts higher than the car, and she drove it at fifteen miles an hour with the wipers going and her nose almost to the windshield. They passed the Riverside Tavern, dark. They passed a Christmas tree lot with a hand-painted sign, ALL TREES $8 — YOU HAUL, abandoned, the last few trees buried to their tops like soldiers in a trench. They passed a payphone at the corner of Hamilton Street with its little light still burning inside a cap of snow, and a house with a plywood Santa on the porch roof and a string of blinking lights that spelled NOEL with the second letter burned out, so that it said N EL, N EL, N EL into the storm. At the top of Ferry Street she caught a glimpse, between drifts, of the river itself, black and moving, and on the far side, faint as a pencil line, the lights of Fort Erie in Canada.
Lucian looked at the river for as long as he could see it, and said nothing.
The dispatch office was warm and smelled of burnt coffee and Gino's cologne. The radio was going when they came in, the speaker on the console crackling, a man's voice saying, "—anybody home? Hello? Gino, you old goat, you leave us out here?" and Harper put Roman down on the army cot in the back room still wrapped in his comforter, and pulled off her parka, and sat down in the oak chair with the stuck wheel, and took the microphone off its hook, and pressed the button.