"Let it hum. There are refrigerators all over this city. Somebody's going to hear yours and feel at home."
She took a clean cassette out of its case, a Memorex from the three-pack at Twin Fair, and put it in, and set the little microphone on the oilcloth in front of her, and looked at it.
"Pick one," Lucian said. "One person. Who's awake at three in the morning?"
She thought about it. She thought about the woman whose son had been on the Charles Tewksbury, sitting up beside a sleeping husband with a scanner on the nightstand. She thought about the man in the booth by the pie case at the Your Host. She thought about an eight-year-old under the covers on Hertel Avenue, with a stolen stamp and a green Philco, saying goodnight to the lakes because she didn't know where else her mother might be.
And then, surprising herself, she thought about a man of sixty-one in a double house in Lackawanna, laid off since summer from the bar mill, with a bad back from twenty-six years in front of an open hearth, who had worked nights all his life and now didn't have to, and who, she knew—she had always known—couldn't sleep anyway. Who had carried her up the stairs asleep on a Christmas Eve twenty-one years ago, and missed the only message that mattered, same as she had. Who sat up now in a kitchen she hadn't been inside in three years, with the radio on, because the house made noises.
She pressed Record.
"Good evening," she said. "It's three o'clock in the morning, and I know you're up. You never could sleep after the shift, even when there wasn't one anymore. It's cold out by the lake tonight, maybe fourteen degrees, wind off the water. The trains are still running on the Belt Line, I can hear them from here. This is Harper. I'll keep you company for a while, if you want."
She talked for nine minutes. She did not do the bit about the Peace Bridge or the Sabres. She did the weather on the lake, the way she'd heard it done all night. She talked about a Christmas tree with too much tinsel, and a boy who said the Linus speech by heart, and a plate of pierogi from a neighbor who had made one hundred. She did not play Patsy Cline, because she still had no cable, but she said, "Here's one my mother used to like," and hummed the first two lines of "Sto Lat," the birthday song, the only song she could remember her mother singing, and stopped, and said, "I don't sing. That's why they give me the microphone and not the records." At the end she said, "This is Harper. Keep a lamp in the window," and paused, and then she said, very quietly, "Goodnight, Dad," and stopped the tape.
Lucian didn't say anything. He reached across the table and pressed Rewind, and they listened to the little machine whir, and when it clicked he said, "That's the one. Send them that one."
"I said 'Dad' at the end. I can't send them that."