She looked back at the car. Roman's face was a pale oval behind the fogged window, his breath making a clear patch and losing it, making it and losing it. She thought of all the things she was supposed to think: a strange man, an old man, nobody knew anything about him, she had a child, she had eighty-one dollars in a coffee can and a job that was ending. She thought of her father, who would have said, You don't bring strays home, Aggie, you can't feed the ones you got. She thought of Mrs. Wilk's one hundred pierogi.
"What's in the blanket?" she said.
He looked down at it, and something in his face changed, softened and closed at the same time. "A radio," he said. "A Zenith. It was my wife's. It doesn't work. I couldn't leave it for the man with the plywood."
Harper nodded. Then she bent down, took the handle of the cardboard suitcase in one hand, and with the other she took him by the elbow, through the thick wool, the arm under it as thin as a broom handle.
"Come on," she said. "You're coming home with us. Just for tonight. Just till the buses run. Don't argue with me, I'm a dispatcher, I've heard every argument there is."
He did not argue. He let her help him stand, which took a long time, and he held the radio against his chest the whole way to the car, and when she opened the back door of the Country Squire and Roman turned around in the front seat and stared at him, he lowered his head and said, "Good evening, young man. I'm sorry to intrude on your Christmas," in that warm, astonishing voice, and Roman, who did not talk to strangers and had been told not to talk to strangers since he could walk, said, "That's okay. We're getting marshmallows."
They skipped Bells. Harper drove the four blocks back to Amherst Street with the heater roaring on high and doing almost nothing, and with every block she was aware of the old man behind her, of his breathing, which was shallow and careful, and of the smell that came off his coat as it began to thaw: wet wool, mothballs, and very faintly, underneath, pipe tobacco and bay rum, like the inside of a barbershop in a town that no longer existed.
Getting him up the outside stairs was the hard part. The steps were iced in spite of the rock salt she'd thrown that morning, and his oxfords had no grip, and he would not let go of the radio. In the end Roman carried the radio, with enormous seriousness, both arms locked around it and his tongue between his teeth, and Harper went up behind the old man with her hands on his back, one step and a rest, one step and a rest, while Mrs. Wilk opened her door downstairs and looked up at them with her mouth in a perfect O.
"Harper," she called. "Who is this?"
"A man from the bus stop," Harper called back. "The buses stopped."
Mrs. Wilk stood there in her housecoat for a long moment, considering this, the snow blowing in past her into her clean front hall. Then she said, "I will bring more pierogi," and shut the door.