She turned it off. She sat with both hands on the wheel and watched the windshield fog, and she let herself think, just once and all the way through, the sentence: I am going to lose my job. Then she put it away the way she put away the presents, in the trunk, under a blanket, for later.
The tape in her pocket pressed against her ribs.
Mrs. Wilk lived on the ground floor of the double house on Amherst Street, under Harper and Roman, and she had watched Roman every afternoon since he was four, for twenty dollars a week that she tried to refuse and Harper left under the sugar bowl anyway. She was a tiny widow from Rzeszów with a cloud of white hair and a house that smelled of cabbage and Jean Naté, and she had a plastic-covered sofa that crackled when you sat on it and a framed picture of Pope John Paul II beside a framed picture of Jimmy Carter, because, she said, they were both good men who smiled too much for their own good.
Roman was on the floor in front of her console television when Harper came in stamping snow off her boots. He was nine years old and built like a folding ruler, all joints, and he was lying on his stomach with his chin on his fists watching the end of The Little Drummer Boy, the Rankin-Bass one with the lamb. He did not look up.
"The lamb gets hit by a chariot," he said, by way of greeting.
"I know, baby. I've seen it."
"He doesn't die, though. He gets better at the end."
"Because of the drummer boy."
"Because of the baby Jesus," Mrs. Wilk said from the kitchen doorway, firmly. "Not because of the drum. Drums are very loud." She came forward with a foil package. "Pierogi. Potato and cheese. And also kapusta, which he will not eat, but you will."
"Mrs. Wilk, you didn't have to."
"I had to. I made one hundred. My son in Cleveland is not coming because of the snow, so now I have one hundred pierogi and nobody." She pressed the package into Harper's hands and looked up into her face with the frightening directness of very small old women. "Something happened."