The Lights

Chapter OneThe Guest Room

The spreadsheet had nine columns, and Walt Brubaker was proud of every one of them.

He had made it on the computer in the little room off the living room, which had been Kyle's bedroom until Kyle left for college and had been Walt's office ever since, at his father's oak desk, over three evenings in early November, and printed it in landscape so that it would fit, and taped it to the inside of the guest room door at eye level. Column A was the item. Column B was the quantity. Column C was the location, which was a drawer or a shelf or a closet, and Column D was a check mark to show that the item was in fact in that location, which he had gone around and checked that morning with a pencil. Column E was notes. Columns F through I were for the Kahales, in case they had questions, and were blank.

Towels, bath, it said. 4. Hall closet, 2nd shelf. Check. Towels, hand. 4. Same. Check. Blankets, wool, extra. 2. Cedar chest, foot of bed. Note: Grace's mother's. Itchy. Check.

There was a line for the space heater, and a line for the extension cord for the space heater, which was the good orange one from the garage and not the brown one from the basement, which Walt did not trust. There was a line for the radio on the nightstand, with the four best stations written in Column E in order of reliability, and the Phillies station crossed out, because it was November. There was a line for the night light in the upstairs hall. There was a line that said Snow shovel (for Mr. Kahale, if wanted). 1. Back porch.

"Walter," said Grace, from the hall.

"Yes."

"Is that a spreadsheet on the guest room door?"

"It's a list."

"It's taped to the door."

"It's a list," said Walt, "that is taped to the door."

Grace came and stood beside him and read it. She was wearing her good gray slacks and the red cardigan with the pearl buttons, and her reading glasses were on their chain, and she had been cleaning the house since the second week of October. She had washed every curtain. She had taken every dish out of the china cabinet and washed it and put it back. She had made Walt carry the dining room rug out to the clothesline and beat it with a broom while she watched from the kitchen window, and when he came in, red faced, she had said, "Again," and he had gone back out. Three days ago she had cleaned the inside of the oven, and then, because the oven looked so much better than the stove, she had cleaned the stove.

"Itchy," she read.

"It is itchy."

"It was my mother's."

"It was itchy when it was your mother's."

She read the rest of it. He waited. Thirty nine years of marriage had taught him that when Grace read something of his all the way to the bottom without saying anything, it meant one of two things, and he had never been able to tell which.

"Who are columns F through I for?"

"The Kahales. In case they have questions."

"Why would they write their questions on the door?"

"So we would have them in one place."

Grace took off her reading glasses and let them fall on their chain, and looked at him for a long moment, as she had once looked at second graders who had brought a frog in from recess and put it in her desk. Then she reached up and took the pen out of his shirt pocket and, in Column F, on the first line, in her small round teacher's hand, wrote: Welcome.

She put the pen back in his pocket.

"There," she said. "Now it has a question in it."

"That isn't a question."

"It's the only question," said Grace, and went downstairs to look at the oven again.

Freddie had been told not to come before noon. He came at eleven forty, which for Freddie was a sign of great personal growth.

He came in the back door without knocking, in his VFW jacket and a Phillies hat with the ear flaps down, stamping his boots on the mat though there was no snow on them, and took the hat off and stood holding it in both hands in the middle of Grace's kitchen like a man in a hospital waiting room.

"I'm not staying," he said.

"Good morning, Freddie," said Grace.

"I'm just dropping off." He held out a white paper bag from the Dutch Kitchen. "Shoofly pie. Wet bottom. In case they never had it."

"They never had it," said Walt. "They're from Hawaii."

"That's what I'm saying." Freddie set the bag on the counter, carefully, as if it might go off, and took in the kitchen. "Holy smokes, Grace. You clean the walls?"

"I wiped them down."

"You wiped the walls." He turned to Walt. Walt met his eye. There was nothing to say about it, and they both knew it, and they had been friends since 1971.

"Four hundred and twenty two," said Freddie, quieter.

"Days?"

"Days. I been out to see June this morning, and she was having a good one."

June Boyer was the Colonel's wife. Since the summer, since the Colonel went away, Freddie had driven to Fairview three evenings a week to sit with her in the memory care wing and sing to her, badly, and she called him Harold, who had been her husband's brother, and Freddie let her.

"She asked me was I going to the lights this year. She asked me was I going to the lights this year. I said I didn't know. She said Harold always takes her to the lights." He turned the hat around in his hands. "So maybe I'll take her."

"That's very kind, Freddie," said Grace.

"It's a wheelchair and a blanket and a thermos. It's not kind. It's a Wednesday." He put the hat back on. "What time's the plane?"

"Five forty," said Walt. "Through Charlotte."

"You want me to come? I could hold a sign."

"No," said Grace and Walt, together.

Freddie nodded, as if he had expected it, and as if he did not mind at all, and went out the back door to his truck. Margaret was in the cab, in the passenger seat, wearing a red knitted sweater with a white snowflake on it that somebody at the VFW auxiliary had made her for the holidays. She watched Walt through the windshield with her yellow eyes while Freddie backed out. She was chewing something. It was hard to know what. It was always hard to know what.

The trouble, Walt thought, standing in the arrivals hall at Lehigh Valley International Airport at a quarter to six with his hands in his coat pockets, was that he did not know what they would look like.

He had seen them. He had seen them three times on the computer, on a screen in the little room, in a window the size of a paperback, with Kyle and Noelani crowded into the frame beside them and a palm tree moving behind them in the wind. Mr. Kahale was a big man with a gray crew cut who had said almost nothing. Mrs. Kahale was a small woman with short black hair and glasses on a beaded chain, who had said a great deal, mostly to Grace, about the wedding. They had seemed perfectly nice. They had seemed, in the way of people on a computer screen, about four inches tall.

The board said the Charlotte flight was on the ground. People began to come down the long hall from the gates, in twos and threes, and past the man at the podium, and out into the arrivals hall, where other people were waiting for them. A soldier, and his mother, who cried. Three college boys with laundry bags. A woman with a cat carrier, and in the carrier, a cat, very angry.

"Do you think they'll recognize us?" said Grace. She had worn her good wool coat and the red scarf and her pearl earrings, and she had put on lipstick in the car, in the mirror on the visor, at a red light on Airport Road.

"There's only us," said Walt.

"There's other people."

"There's only us waiting for somebody from Hawaii," said Walt, and then he saw them, and understood that recognizing them was not going to be a problem.

They came down the long hall in aloha shirts.

Mr. Kahale's was blue, with white hibiscus flowers on it, the size of dinner plates. Mrs. Kahale's was green, with yellow birds. They were each pulling a black suitcase on wheels and carrying a light jacket over one arm, folded, the kind of jacket you would take to a movie theater in case the air conditioning was too strong. Mr. Kahale had on a pair of leather sandals. Through the glass doors at the end of the arrivals hall, beyond the baggage carousels, it was full dark, and the bank sign across the parking deck said 31 degrees.

"Oh, dear," said Grace.

Mrs. Kahale saw them first. She lifted a hand and waved, a small, quick, decisive wave, and came straight at them across the hall at a pace that made the man at the podium step back. Up close she was even smaller than she had looked on the screen. She came up to Walt's chin. She had a lei of tiny white shells around her neck and a binder under her arm, a thick blue three ring binder, with tabs.

"Grace," she said. "Walt." She put down the suitcase handle and took Grace's hands in both of hers and looked up at her, hard, as if checking her for fever. "Leilani. Finally. Look at you. You look just like Kyle said."

"What did Kyle say?" said Grace.

"He said you'd be wearing a red scarf," said Leilani, "and you'd be the one in charge."

Grace considered this.

"That's very nice," she said, in the voice she used for compliments she had not yet decided about.

Mr. Kahale had come up behind his wife. He was even bigger than he looked on the screen, which seemed to be how the Kahales did everything, in the wrong direction from what you expected, broad through the chest and shoulders, with forearms that had pulled cable for a living. He set his suitcase upright beside his wife's, with the handle lined up exactly, and held out a hand to Walt.

"Kimo," he said.

His hand was warm and dry and enormous and careful, as if it had learned early what they could do by accident.

"Walt."

"Walt." Kimo nodded once. He gazed past Walt at the glass doors and the dark beyond them and the bank sign. Thirty one. Then he tipped his head back and studied the ceiling of the arrivals hall, for some reason, as if he expected the snow to be up there.

"Long flight," said Walt.

"Fourteen hours. With Charlotte."

"Well. You're here."

"We're here," Kimo agreed.

There was a pause. Walt had never been good at the first five minutes of anything. He was better at the years that came after. At the carousel behind them a bell rang and the belt began to move.

"Do you have bags?" said Walt.

"These are the bags," said Kimo.

"For a month?"

"Leilani has a second bag," said Kimo. "Coming tomorrow. It missed Charlotte."

"It has my coat in it," said Leilani, without turning around. She had opened the binder on top of her suitcase and was showing Grace a tab marked VENUES. "And Kimo's coat. Our boots. The gloves Noelani bought us. The hats." She turned a page. "This is the one on the North Shore I was telling you about. You can see the water from every table."

"Mm," said Grace. She had taken out, from her purse, a folded sheet of yellow legal paper. Walt knew that sheet. It had been on the refrigerator under a magnet since September, and it said, at the top, in her small round hand, Fire Hall, July? (Ask Bud).

"I was thinking," said Grace, "since most of the family is here..."

"Most of Kyle's family," said Leilani.

"Most of the family," said Grace.

They stood face to face in the arrivals hall at Lehigh Valley International Airport with the binder between them and the yellow sheet between them, two retired schoolteachers, one of whom had been a principal for twenty years, and Walt, who had once seen Grace stop a fight between two fourth grade boys with a single word without raising her voice or taking her hand off her coffee cup, felt the temperature in the room go down by about ten degrees. He glanced at Kimo. Kimo was studying the ceiling again.

"Why do you keep looking up?" said Walt.

Kimo took his time answering. He seemed to take his time with everything.

"I was told," he said, "there would be snow."

There was no snow in the parking deck. There was a wind instead, coming hard and flat across the open top level where Walt had parked the Buick, a dry, cold, November wind off the Blue Mountain with nothing in it but cold, and it came through the Kahales' aloha shirts as if they were made of paper.

Leilani put on the movie theater jacket and zipped it to her chin. Kimo put on nothing. He stood beside the Buick in his sandals while Walt opened the trunk and loaded the suitcases, and the wind flattened the hibiscus flowers to his chest. He lifted his face into it with his eyes shut.

"You'll want your jacket," said Walt.

"Not yet," said Kimo.

"It's thirty one degrees."

"I know," said Kimo. "I've never been in thirty one degrees." He breathed in through his nose. "It smells like the inside of a freezer."

"That's November," said Walt.

Kimo nodded slowly, as if Walt had told him a fact worth keeping, and got into the front seat, and did not put on his jacket until they were halfway home on Route 22, when Leilani reached forward from the back seat without a word and dropped it on his lap. He put it on then. Walt turned up the heat. In the back seat, Grace and Leilani had opened the binder again between them on the seat and were going through it page by page by the light of the dome light, which Walt had been asked to turn on, and which he would have liked very much to turn off, because he could not see the road.

"This is the menu from the place in Haleiwa."

"Mm."

"Kalua pig. Lomi salmon. Poke. Haupia for dessert. That's a kind of coconut pudding."

"It sounds lovely," said Grace. "Of course the fire company does a very nice chicken."

"I'm sure it does."

"Bud Seip does the chicken himself. On the pit."

"I'm sure he does."

Walt glanced across at Kimo. Kimo was watching the Lehigh Valley go by in the dark: the long lit strip of the Fogelsville exit, the truck stops, the warehouses, a mile of warehouses, one after another, each as big as a town, lit up white and orange and running all night.

"What are those?" said Kimo.

"Warehouses."

"For what?"

"For everything," said Walt. "You buy something on your phone, it comes from one of those."

Kimo watched them go by.

"We don't have those," he said.

"We didn't either," said Walt, "until about ten years ago."

Mill Road was dark, as it always was after six, with no streetlights past the bend and the Yoders' field a long black stretch on the left and the porch light on at the Brubakers' house on the right, where Grace had left it. The house was the same house it had been for thirty six years: a two story brick farmhouse with green shutters, a porch with a swing, and a big sycamore in the side yard that dropped its bark in long white strips all summer and its leaves all fall. Walt had raked the leaves twice that week. He had raked them once more that morning, in the dark, with a flashlight, after he finished checking the spreadsheet.

He pulled into the driveway. Leilani was out of the car before the engine stopped, binder under her arm. Grace was out a second after her. They went up the porch steps side by side, not quite racing, each of them used to being the first one in.

Kimo did not get out.

He sat in the front seat with his jacket zipped and his big hands on his knees and studied the house through the windshield. The porch light. The swing. Grace's wreath on the door, which she had put up a week early so it would be there when they came, made of real pine from the Yoders' woodlot and a red velvet bow. The front window, with the lamp lit inside and the curtains Grace had washed.

"It's a nice house," he said.

"Thank you."

"Old."

"1891."

Kimo nodded. "Our house is 1974. Kaneohe. Concrete block." He studied the house a while longer. "Noelani said you'd have a spreadsheet."

Walt felt himself go red.

"It's a list," he said.

"She said you'd say that." Kimo opened his door. The cold came in. "She said not to make fun of it. She said it means you're glad we came."

He got out, and stood in the driveway in his sandals, and did not go toward the house. He turned the other way, instead, toward the back of the yard, past the sycamore, and walked out onto the cold grass in the dark, and stood there with his hands in the pockets of the movie theater jacket, looking north across the Yoders' field toward the ridge.

Walt got out and went and stood beside him. It seemed to be the thing to do.

The ridge was a long low black shape against a sky that was not quite black, with a few stars in it and the glow of Allentown low in the east. You could make out the line of trees along the top. You could make out, near the top, the old silo on the Gernert place, a darker shape against the dark, and if you knew where to look, the long pale line of the farm lane going up the hill from the road. There was nothing on it. Not a light.

"What's up there?" said Kimo.

"A farm."

"A farm," said Kimo. He went on looking. "Noelani says there are lights."

"Friday," said Walt. "Opening night is the day after Thanksgiving. Six o'clock." He wanted to explain it properly, so that it would be clear. "It's the Gernert place. Gernert's Christmas Farm. It's been lit up every December since 1953. Six hundred thousand lights, they say. Forty acres. People come from three counties. They park in the hayfield and walk up through it."

"Six hundred thousand."

"So they say."

"That's a lot of load," said Kimo.

Walt turned. Kimo's eyes stayed on the ridge, with a small frown, the frown of a man doing arithmetic in his head.

"It's all dark now," Kimo said. "Two days before. Nobody tests it?"

"Not Ray."

"Who's Ray?"

"Ray Gernert. He owns it. He's eighty four." Walt put his hands in his pockets. The cold was coming up through the soles of his shoes. "He doesn't test it. He says if it doesn't work on opening night, that's what opening night is for. He doesn't believe in timers, either. Every night, all season, at six o'clock, he goes into a little shed behind the barn and throws a switch. By hand. His father did it before him. The crowd at the gate counts down from ten, and Ray throws the switch, and the whole hill comes on at once." Walt was quiet a moment. "I used to go every year when I was a boy. My father took me. You'd sit in the line of cars for an hour, on the road, and you could see the hill from a mile away."

Kimo turned his head toward him for the first time since they had gotten out of the car.

"By hand," he said.

"By hand."

"Six hundred thousand lights."

"Every night."

Kimo looked back at the ridge, at the black line of trees and the dark silo and the long pale lane with nothing on it. The wind came across the Yoders' field. Somewhere behind them, in the house, a door opened, and Grace's voice called, "Walter? Is Kimo all right?" and then, lower, to someone in the hall, "He's standing in the yard."

"Huh," said Kimo, to the ridge.

Walt stayed where he was. He was content to wait. It was the first time since the airport that he had not felt he ought to be saying something.

"Who runs all that?" Kimo said at last.

"A man named Ray Gernert," said Walt. "By hand."