"That's where I was going," he said, "tonight. Before the Salvation Army. I wanted to go and stand there and tell her about the plywood. I thought she'd find it funny." He smiled. "She would have, too."
"Why did you keep the letters?"
"Cecilia kept them," he said. "Not all. Thousands came, over the years. She kept the ones she couldn't throw away. She had a Dutch Masters cigar box full, and she kept yours on top, always on top, and every Christmas Eve she'd take it out and read it, and then she'd look at me over her glasses and say, 'I wonder if she ever took it.' The name. She always wondered. Once, in 1972 or so, she made me go through the phone book. There were fourteen columns of Mazurs. I called two, and then I lost my nerve." He shook his head. "This morning, with the plywood man waiting, I could only carry what fit in my coat. I took the top of the box. The rest is in the Dutch Masters, in a basement on Tonawanda Street that's going to be a parking lot."
Harper wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
"We'll get it," she said.
"It's sealed up, my dear. The man was very thorough with the plywood."
"I know every tow-truck driver and locksmith and bad-tempered cousin in this city," Harper said. "I'm a dispatcher. We'll get it."
He looked at her for a long moment, and then he laughed, and the laugh turned into something else, and he took off his glasses and pressed his fingers into his eyes, and she slid off the desk and knelt beside the oak chair and put her arms around him, overcoat and maroon scarf and all, and held on.
The snow stopped at a quarter to six.
Gino called at six-fifteen to say his mother had rallied around four, had sat up in bed and demanded tea and asked why he was dressed like a bum on Christmas, and had gone back to sleep, and the doctor said maybe a week, maybe a month, who knew, she was a Pietrangeli. "And Harper," he said, his voice strange. "I got a call. At the nursing home. Lenihan's wife, from Buffalo General. She said there was some kind of a radio show on my cars last night. Some old guy. She said half the night shift at General was crowded around a scanner at the nurses' station, and the head nurse cried. What the hell went on at my company?"