"I'll tell you when you come in," Harper said. "Merry Christmas, Gino."
Wilbur came in at seven, rosy and proud, with a state trooper's thermos he'd forgotten to give back, and took the desk. Mose Hubbard drove them home in car fourteen, a two-tone Chevy Impala with a crack in the windshield and a pine-tree air freshener so old it had no smell left. He would not take the fare. He drove slowly, the plowed streets shining, the sky going from gray to lavender to a pale, washed, astonishing blue, and the snow on every roof and wire and parked car in the city lighting up pink as the sun came over the east side. At the corner of Amherst and Niagara he stopped by the bus shelter, the one where they'd found Lucian, and sat looking at it for a moment with the engine running.
"All them years," he said, to nobody. Then he turned around in the driver's seat, a big gray-haired man with a face like a walnut, and held out his hand over the seat back, and Lucian shook it. "Mose Hubbard," he said. "It was a DeSoto with no heater. I'd have froze to death some nights. I just want you to know that."
"I'm very glad you didn't," Lucian said.
Christmas morning, in the upper flat on Amherst Street, was sloppy and loud and better than she had planned. Mrs. Wilk came up in her church coat with a babka and a bottle of cherry cordial and stayed four hours. Roman got the Stretch Armstrong and the Matchbox cars and the Titanic book and the boots, and stretched the Stretch Armstrong across the whole living room with Lucian holding the other arm, until Mrs. Wilk made them stop for fear of an explosion. There was no present for Lucian, so Roman gave him one of the Matchbox cars, a yellow Checker cab with a dent in it, wrapped in the funny pages, and Lucian turned it over in his fingers for a long time and then put it in the inside pocket of his overcoat, with the letters, and buttoned the pocket.
Harper had brought the Zenith in from the kitchen and set it on the living room windowsill, beside her mother's ceramic tree, in the sun. It didn't play. It sat there brown and shining, the crack in its corner mended with old yellow glue. Roman had already asked three times about Mr. Cholewa's tube tester, and when exactly the day after Christmas began, and whether Mr. Cholewa might be related to the Cholewa who drove car seventeen, which Harper thought was very likely, since every Cholewa in Black Rock was related to every other.
In the afternoon, while Roman lay on the rug reading about the Titanic and Mrs. Wilk dozed on the sofa with her hands folded on her stomach like a saint on a tomb, Harper sat down at the kitchen table with the Panasonic.
Lucian sat across from her. He had slept for three hours on the sofa before Mrs. Wilk arrived, and shaved with Harper's pink Daisy razor, and looked, in the clean winter light, both older and less tired than he had at the bus stop. He didn't say anything. He just took the bath towel she'd brought from the bathroom, and folded it, and set it aside on the counter.
"You won't need it," he said.
"The refrigerator hums."