Every light on the Hamm porch was gone.
Earl stood in the cold and did the arithmetic, which was something he could do perfectly well no matter what Floyd Eckert said.
The lights had moved one house a night, every night, always down the street. Yoder to Baker. Baker to Simmons.
Simmons to Henderson. Henderson to Hamm.
Always downhill. Always toward the creek.
The Hamm rental was the second-to-last house on Maple Street.
There was only one house left.
Earl unwound the lights from his car himself, carefully, and wound them around his hand the way his father had taught him. Then he walked down to the bottom of Maple Street.
He didn't knock right away. He stood at the end of the Teel driveway and looked.
Two sets of lights lay in a laundry basket on the porch steps, wound around paper towel tubes. Beside the basket was a stepladder, the short kind, only three steps tall. Somebody had been planning to use it.
He knocked.
Marjorie Teel opened the door in a quilted robe. She was seventy-nine, small and sharp-eyed, and she looked at the sheriff on her porch and then at the basket of lights, and Earl watched her understand all of it at once.
"Oh, Mason," she said quietly, over her shoulder. "Oh, honey."
Mason Teel was ten. He'd been living with his grandmother since the summer, while his dad drove long-haul out of Dallas and saved up to move back to Ohio. He came down the hall in his pajamas with his hands jammed in the pockets, looking at the floor.
Earl sat down at the kitchen table. Marjorie poured him coffee. Mason sat across from him and waited to be arrested.
"Help me understand something," Earl said. "Why move them one house at a time?"
Mason didn't look up. "Because I couldn't carry a whole bunch at once. I'm not tall enough for the high parts. So I'd just take one set down the street every night, and borrow the next one, and keep going." He swallowed. "I was going to bring them all back after Christmas. I wrote down which ones were whose."
He pulled a folded piece of notebook paper out of his pajama pocket. It was a list, in pencil, in careful block letters. Yoder, 4 strands.
Baker, 2 strands. Simmons, 3 strands and 1 wreath.
"You did this all by yourself?"
"Grandpa showed me how to wind them on tubes. Last year. He said you write the feet on the tape so the next person knows." Mason's voice got small. "Grandma didn't put up anything this year. She said she couldn't. Grandpa always did it."
Marjorie set down the coffee pot and sat down very slowly.
"Grandpa used to say the lights were so people could find their way home," Mason said. "And Dad's coming on the twenty-third. He hasn't been home for Christmas in four years. And our house was the only dark one, and I was scared he'd drive right past it."
The kitchen was quiet for a while.
Earl finished his coffee. Then he stood up and put his hat on.
"Mason," he said, "I'm going to need you to come with me."
Mason went white. Marjorie started to stand.
"We've got five houses on Maple Street that need their lights back," Earl said. "That's a lot of ladder work. I'll do the high parts. You do the list."
They spent Saturday morning putting every strand back where it came from, Mason reading the list out loud and Earl climbing the ladder.
At every house, Earl let the boy knock on the door and say he was sorry himself. Pete Yoder shook his hand. Russ Henderson, still in his bathrobe, told Mason he'd done a nicer job hanging them than Dale ever had.
Then Earl drove to the diner and told the story at the Liars' Table.
By two o'clock that afternoon, there were nine pickups parked along the bottom of Maple Street.
Pete Yoder brought his extension ladder. Tyler brought a box of new LED strands from the feed store and an outlet timer.
Russ Henderson brought a thermos of hot chocolate and a plastic Santa from his attic that he said he'd never liked anyway. Dot came at four with sandwiches and supervised from the sidewalk.
Earl and Pete hung Lou Teel's big wooden star over the garage, the way Lou had hung it every December since 1979.
Mason stood in the snow with his grandmother and watched them work. Marjorie held his hand.
She didn't say much. Once Earl saw her take a handkerchief out of her robe pocket and then put it back without using it.
At five-fifteen, with the sky going dark, Mason plugged in the cord.
On the night of December twenty-third, a little after ten, a pickup with Texas plates turned off Route 9 onto Maple Street.
It came slow down the hill, past the Yoders and the Bakers and the Simmonses and the Hendersons and the Hamm rental, every one of them lit. At the bottom of the street, it slowed even more.
The Teel house was blazing. Every gutter, every window, every bush in the yard. Lou's big wooden star burned white over the garage, and a small figure in a winter coat was standing out at the end of the drive, where he'd been standing for an hour, waving both arms over his head.
The pickup's headlights found him, and the truck turned in toward home.