The upper flat was four rooms in a row, railroad style: a kitchen at the back, then a living room, then Roman's room, then Harper's, with a bathroom tucked off the kitchen that had been a pantry when the house was built in 1910 and still had the pantry's narrow window. The Christmas tree stood in the corner of the living room, a five-foot Scotch pine from the lot at the Super Duper on Hertel, strung with big colored bulbs that got hot enough to burn your fingers and draped in so much tinsel that Roman had applied himself, one strand at a time, that it looked like it was standing in a silver rain. On the windowsill was a ceramic tree with little plastic bulbs that lit up, which had been her mother's. The radiator under the window clanked and hissed. It was, after the bus shelter, as warm as a kitchen in August.
She sat the old man down at the kitchen table, in the good chair with the cushion, and knelt and untied his shoes. The laces were frozen into knots. She worked them with her fingernails, and when she finally got the first shoe off, the sock underneath was soaked and his foot inside it was white and waxy at the toes, and cold as a bottle from the refrigerator.
"Roman," she said, "get the dishpan. Fill it with water from the tap. Not hot. Lukewarm. Like a bath for a baby. Test it with your elbow."
"Why my elbow?"
"Because that's how you test it. Go."
The old man watched her with an expression she couldn't read. "You've done this before," he said.
"I've had drivers come in off a twelve-hour shift in January with the heater broken. They don't feel their feet, and then they put them right up against the radiator, and then they feel them a lot." She got the second shoe off. "Lukewarm first. Then slowly. It's going to hurt. I'm sorry."
"I've been told I have a high tolerance for pain," he said. "Though in fairness, the person who told me that was my wife, and she said it about my taste in music."
Roman came back with the dishpan sloshing, and they put the old man's feet in it, and he closed his eyes and said nothing at all for a long time, though his hands on the table closed slowly into fists and then slowly opened again. Harper put the kettle on. She got out the Swiss Miss and the last of the instant coffee and the bag of Mrs. Wilk's pierogi and a stick of butter and an onion, and she started the onion in the cast-iron pan because that was what you did, you started an onion, and the room filled up with the smell of it, and the windows went white with steam.
The old man opened his eyes. "That," he said, "is the most beautiful smell in the world. I'd forgotten."
"It's an onion."