"Dispatch goes out to Cheektowaga. They got a big room out there, six consoles, a computer that's supposed to tell them where every car is. Like the Pentagon." He spread his hands. "They're keeping Wilbur. Thirty-one years, they can't not keep Wilbur. They said they'd look at you."
"Look at me."
"Look at you, take your application, look at you some more. Harper, I fought. I'm telling you I fought. I said she's the best I ever had, she knows every one-way street in this city including the ones the city forgot about. They said they had a list." He looked at her then, and his eyes were wet, which was worse than anything he could have said. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. On Christmas Eve. I'm a bum."
"You're not a bum." She heard her own voice come out flat and pleasant, the dispatcher's voice, the one that told a driver his fare had walked away without paying as if it were a weather report. "When after New Year's?"
"The fifteenth. You'll get two weeks extra. I'll make it three. Don't tell my accountant."
She nodded. Her hands, she noticed, had arranged themselves on the console in front of her, on either side of the microphone, very neatly, as if they were about to be photographed. Rent on the upper flat on Amherst Street was two hundred and sixty dollars a month. The Country Squire needed a muffler and probably a heater core and certainly a miracle. Roman needed boots, because the ones from Hens & Kelly were already too small and it was only December, and he grew in the night like bread dough. There was eighty-one dollars in the coffee can on top of the refrigerator and three hundred and twelve in the savings account at Erie County Savings Bank, and the Christmas presents were already bought and wrapped and hidden in the trunk of the car, and that was all the arithmetic she wanted to do on the twenty-fourth of December.
"Go home," Gino said gently. "Wilbur comes in at six. I'll sit the radio till then. Go home to your boy."
"You don't know how to work the radio."
"I know how to push the button and say 'what.' That's most of it." He took the microphone off its hook and held it like a pastry. "Go on. Take the box. Merry Christmas, Harper."
She took the box.
Outside the snow had the sound of sand being poured. Her car was a 1974 Ford Country Squire station wagon, pale green, with wood-grain vinyl on the sides that was peeling at the back corner like a bad sunburn, and a tailgate that only opened if you hit it twice with the heel of your hand and said please. She had bought it for six hundred dollars from a retired Lutheran minister in Tonawanda who had told her, solemnly, that it had never been driven in anger. She had driven it in anger plenty since. She scraped the windshield with a plastic scraper shaped like a hand, a giveaway from Bells Supermarket, and when she got in and turned the key the engine coughed twice and caught, and the radio came on to WKBW in the middle of Brenda Lee, rockin' around the Christmas tree.