The thing that tumbled into the glove of Tyler was a small silver bell, no bigger than a walnut, with a cracked leather strap and a clapper that had gone dark with age. It gave off a single, quiet note when he turned it, a note like a very old memory. Maureen pressed her fingers to her lips. “That was the bell of my mother,” she whispered. “She hung it on the front door every Christmas for fifty years. When my father came home late from the firehouse, he would hear it from the street and know that the lights were on and someone was waiting. The last thing she said about it was, Whoever hangs the lights next gets the bell.”
She looked up at the dark windows of the house across the street and her voice grew thin. “I came home for the funeral, and I walked into that house, and I could not stand it. Fifty years of Christmas, and the rooms were so quiet. I wanted to put it up for sale that same afternoon. Then I came out onto the porch, and I saw the lights. Your lights, Tyler. Crooked, and uneven, and the best thing I had seen in a year.” She wiped her eyes. “I sat on the step and cried for twenty minutes. The neighbors must have thought I was a lunatic.”
She reached into her coat and drew out a folded sheet of paper. “My father left a letter with the lawyer,” she said. “He wrote it the winter after Mom died. It says, If a boy ever hangs lights on my porch, he is to have the house. I have not seen a boy like him since Billy Maher in 1971. The mortgage is paid. The roof is new. I expect the lights to come on every December, without fail. I never said thank you, because I am a stubborn Irishman. Tell him I am a fool. Tell him I cried at the crooked ones.” Maureen lowered the page. “He signed it with a drawing of a candy cane.”
A tarnished silver bell and a string of crooked Christmas bulbs opened a front door that had stayed dark for a year.
I stood up from the step so fast that I nearly lost my footing. “Maureen, he left the house to my son?” “To Tyler, and to you,” she said. “You are to live there, if you want it. He knew you were raising Tyler on a bus driver paycheck. He knew that you were renting half a double house with a leaky roof. He told me, That woman drove my wife to church every Sunday for four years after her hip, and she never charged a dime.” I stared at her. I had forgotten. It had been such a small thing, a few miles in my own car, on my way to the bus yard.
Tyler said nothing. He was gripping the bell with both hands, as though he were afraid that someone would take it back. I put an arm around him and felt how hard his heart was beating. “Mom,” he whispered, “I only hung the lights.” “That is all anybody ever does,” said Maureen. “That is what Dad always said. He said the world is held together by people who only do the small thing, and mean it.” She smiled, and her chin trembled. “He said that about your son, in a letter, three years before the funeral. He knew you both well. He just did not know how to cross the street.”
We moved across the street in January. It was a modest brick house, three bedrooms, with a deep front porch and a tiny kitchen that smelled of coffee and cigars. In the attic, we found forty years of Christmas boxes, each labeled in the neat handwriting of Mary, and a shoebox full of photographs of the firehouse. Tyler spent a whole Saturday sorting through them. At the bottom of the last box lay a Polaroid of the porch, taken in 1983, glittering with big colored bulbs. On the back, in the shaky hand of Mr. Gallagher, were the words, Mary says the best Christmas yet.
Maureen came back for Christmas and stayed for two weeks. She slept in her old room, with the faded wallpaper, and she and Tyler spent the evenings hanging bulbs along the gutters. He taught her how to use the stepladder safely, and she taught him a firehouse knot for the extension cords. On Christmas Eve, the whole street came out, thirty neighbors in coats and scarves, and watched Tyler plug in the lights. The porch blazed. The old bell on the door rang once, softly, in the cold. Maureen put her hand on her heart and did not say a word. She did not have to.
In the spring, Tyler graduated, and he enrolled at Penn State Worthington Scranton to study electrical engineering. He told me that he wanted to learn how to build things that carry light to places where it is dark. I told him that he had been doing that since he was eight years old. He laughed and wiped his nose. He works at the electrical supply store on weekends, and the owner, a gruff man named Mr. Doyle, let him take home a box of new bulbs for the house without charge. “For the porch,” he said, and turned away so no one would see his face.
The next December, when the first snow fell, a young couple moved into the half of the double house that we had left behind. Tyler brought them a plate of cookies, and I noticed that he looked at their bare porch for a long time. The following Saturday, he borrowed the stepladder and hung a string of lights along their gutters. They stood in the yard in puffy coats, watching, and the woman cried. He said he did it because someone had done it for him. It was not exactly true. But it was true enough.
Every night in December now, the lights come on at dusk, the whole street, one porch at a time. Ours is the brightest. Tyler keeps the silver bell hanging on the front door, and when the wind is just right, it rings. People walking by slow down. They look at the crooked bulbs and the old brick and the bell on its cracked strap. And sometimes, if I stand at the window with a cup of tea, I could swear that I see an old Irishman at the end of the walk, with his arms crossed, not saying a word. But smiling.