"May I?" he said quietly.
She didn't understand. Then she did, or began to, and something went cold and then hot in the middle of her chest. She held out the microphone. He took it, and turned it once in his hand, feeling the weight of it. He sat down in her chair, the oak chair with the stuck wheel, and drew it up to the console, and set his glasses on the desk. He did not hurry. He looked at the clock on the wall, which said 1:41. He wet his lips. He pressed the button.
"Good evening," he said. "It's one forty-one on Christmas morning, the wind is out of the west-southwest at thirty knots, the snow is falling on Lake Erie and on the river and on every street in Buffalo, and it's going to keep falling for a while. This is Harper, on the Harbor Light."
The radio went completely silent.
Not static. Silence: seven men in seven cars, all of them with their thumbs off their buttons at once. Harper stood beside the console with her hand pressed flat over her mouth. The voice that had come out of the speaker was older, rougher at the edges, but it was the voice. It was exactly the voice. It was the one under the covers, the one in the dark, the amber dial and the warm smell of the tubes, the voice she had said goodnight with a thousand times, and it was coming from the man in her father's galoshes, sitting in her chair.
Then the speaker clicked, and Mose Hubbard said, very softly, "Lord have mercy."
"Good evening, Mose," Lucian said. "You were wrong about the mustache. But you were right about the bald."
Somebody laughed, a startled bark, and then they were all talking at once, a pileup of clicks and half-words, and Lucian waited for it to clear, patient, smiling, the way you'd wait for children to settle, and when it did he went on.
He did not do it the way she'd done her tape. She saw that right away. He did not talk to Buffalo. He talked to Mose, sitting outside a dark church on East Street. He talked to the Cholewa kid, who was twenty, and whose girl was spending Christmas in Rochester with her parents, who did not approve of cab drivers. He talked to Sobczak in his booth at the Your Host, and to Lenihan, whose cab still smelled of somebody else's ham. He gave them the weather on the lakes, the old way, out of his head and out of the window: wind, waves, visibility less than a quarter mile at Buffalo, ice making on the breakwater, the Canadian side the same. He told them that the Coast Guard station at the foot of Michigan Avenue had its lights on and somebody was sitting up there, too, tonight. He told them a story about the winter of 1936 when he was a wheelsman on an ore boat called the Harry Coulby, stuck in the ice off Port Colborne for nine days with a cook who could make only one thing, which was chipped beef on toast, and how on the ninth day the crew had held a trial and found the chipped beef guilty. He had them laughing on every button in the city.
And then he said, "In the old days, folks would send their messages down to the station, and I'd read them out to the boats. Now, I know there aren't any boats on this frequency tonight. But I've got seven men out there in the dark, and I'd bet each one of them has got someone he'd like to say something to. So I'm going to open up the line. Anybody who's got a message, you go ahead. I'll read it back so the whole fleet can hear it."
There was a pause. Then Wisniewski the handsome one keyed his mike and said, embarrassed, "To my ma on Sobieski Street. I'll be home for breakfast. Save me the kiełbasa."