"You fixed my tape in twenty minutes," she said. "You fixed seven cab drivers in an hour. You've got a Dutch Masters box in a basement on Tonawanda Street with a few thousand people's messages in it that somebody ought to read. And Roman's going to need help with that tube on Saturday, because I don't know a rectifier from a hole in the ground." She turned and looked at him. "Stay till the radio works, then. Just till then. We'll see about after."
He looked across the kitchen at the boy on the windowsill and the brown radio beside him in the last of the sun.
"Till the radio works," he said. "That seems fair. It may be a long time. It's a very old radio."
"It's a very old lamp, too," Harper said. "They still light."
She got up. She took the receiver off the hook, and the dial tone hummed in her ear like a refrigerator, like the sound in every kitchen in the city. She dialed the number in Lackawanna that she had not dialed in three years and had never once forgotten. It rang. It rang again. She stood with the cord wound twice around her wrist and watched the light go red and then purple over the river, and on the fourth ring there was a click, and a breath, and a man's voice, rough, wary, older than she remembered, said, "Hello?"
She opened her mouth. For a moment nothing came; for a moment she was eight years old, standing on a fire hydrant, reaching for a slot she couldn't quite reach.
"Hi, Dad," she said. "It's me. It's Aggie." And then, because she was certain now, because she had been certain for a long time and had only needed someone to ask: "It's Harper. Merry Christmas. Are you awake?"
There was a long silence on the line, long enough that she could hear the faint hum of his kitchen in Lackawanna, the tick of a clock, a radio playing low somewhere in the room behind him. Across her own kitchen, Lucian Zeller had gone very still, his hands folded on the oilcloth, listening the way he had listened all night, as if every voice in the dark were the only one.
"Yeah," her father said at last, and cleared his throat. "Yeah. I'm up. I'm always up." A pause. "Aggie. Harper. Whichever. I'm up."
Outside, one by one, all down Amherst Street, the lamps came on in the windows.