Rain came down in a gray sheet over the old block of 1960s ranch houses, turning the curb into a shallow river that carried leaves and candy wrappers toward the storm drain. Mom called at noon. Her voice sounded small but steady.
“Michael? The porch is dark. I think the bulb died.”
It would have been easy to say, “Tomorrow.” It would have been easy to say, “Ask the neighbor.” But I’d sat at her Formica table a week ago and learned the cost of easy answers. So I left my spreadsheet open, told my boss I had a family errand, and drove the familiar twenty-five minutes down I-96 with the wipers tapping a tired rhythm.
The house looked the same from the street — faded siding, big oak, garden gnome missing its paint. Only the porch light was out. I held my jacket over my head and jogged to the door.
Inside smelled like coffee and lemon polish. The TV was off. The quiet felt heavier than it used to.
“You didn’t have to come in this weather,” she said, already fussing with a dish towel, the way she does when she’s nervous.
“Bulbs don’t care about the rain,” I said. “Besides, I owe that light a lot of arrivals.”
She smiled at that, and I saw the girl she used to be flicker through the years. Then the worry flowed back into her face.
“The ladder’s still in the garage,” she said. “Your father always kept it behind the rakes.”
Dad. Three years gone and somehow still everywhere. His winter coat on a hook. His coffee mug. His pencil cup full of bent nails.
In the garage, the metal ladder leaned where she said it would. On the workbench was his old Maxwell House tin full of screws, a stack of yellowed receipts from a hardware store that closed before my daughter was born, and a small AM radio with a cracked dial. I clicked it on out of habit. Static, then a Tigers pregame talk show I recognized by cadence alone — different voices, same comfort.
Back on the porch, I tested the ladder until it stopped rocking. Mom stood on the threshold, holding the screen door with one hand and the towel with the other.
“Careful,” she said.
“I’ve been careful since you taught me to climb trees,” I said, and it felt true and also like something sons say when they’re afraid to admit they’re scared.
I unscrewed the globe, set it on the step, and reached for the bulb. Cold, slick. It turned with a soft scrape. I handed it down and she cradled it like it might still be warm.
“Got another?” I asked.
She disappeared into the hall closet and came back with a cardboard sleeve of 60-watts. The kind with the old swirl filament printed on the side. She buys them at the last independent hardware shop, the one with the bell that dings over the door and a man named Vic who still writes totals on a paper bag.
“LEDs last longer,” I said, without judgment.
“I like the way these look in the glass,” she said, like a person who still believes light should have a color.
I screwed the new one in and felt the ladder tremble. I thought about years. How long a bulb lasts if a door is opened every evening. How long a promise lasts if you teach it to withstand weather.
As I started to put the globe back, my sleeve brushed the narrow gutter above the porch. Something fluttered down and landed at my feet. A small book. Not a book — a dollar-store spiral notebook, blue cover, edges soft from handling.
Mom stiffened.
“What’s that?” I said.
She hesitated, then nodded toward it. “Open it.”
I bent, the ladder creaking, then climbed down and handed her the globe. I wiped rain from the cover and flipped it open. Inside, in her tidy, looping handwriting, was a list of dates. One per line. Month, day, year. Sometimes a note in parentheses.
April 14 — Mike stopped by after work.
May 8 — Coffee; talked about the oak.
June 2 — Porch light fixed.
June 15 — Stayed through the Tigers.
July 1 — Brought donuts. Laughed.
Pages and pages. Not a to-do list. Not a budget. A ledger of presence. The last entry was last Tuesday, the day of the TV that wasn’t a TV. She’d drawn a tiny heart next to it.
“Mom,” I said.
She looked past me, out at the rain. “After your father died, I… well. Days run together. The notebook helps me remember which ones weren’t empty.”
I turned another page. The handwriting got shakier, then steadied again. Under December 24 of last year, a line read: Michael stayed until eleven; we listened to the old records. Under January 3: He changed the smoke alarm battery without me asking. Under a day in March: He had to leave early; that’s all right.
“That’s all right,” I read, and heard the lie inside the kindness.
“It’s silly,” she said, cheeks flushing in a way that made her look both eighty-two and sixteen. “You don’t need to see that. I’ll throw it away.”
“No,” I said, too quickly. “Don’t.”
The porch light flickered on in my hands, bulb and globe still apart, wires humming a low song I felt in my wrist. The rain had slowed to a steady patter. Somewhere down the block a dog barked at nothing. It all felt like the country I remembered from the backseat of a ’78 Oldsmobile, when life was smaller and somehow more enormous.
“You kept track,” I said.
She shrugged. “A person needs something to count.”
I thought about what I count. Steps. Bank balances. Emails sent. Wins I can show someone. And I thought about what matters when your world is a kitchen, a chair by a window, a porch that creaks in the cold. I thought about how my daughter keeps a digital calendar full of color-coded practices and how someday she might come across a paper spiral with my name on it in handwriting that loops like the past.
“Let’s finish the light,” she said, and there it was again — that practical courage women like her use to steer grief through small tasks.
I climbed the ladder and fastened the globe. When I twisted the base, the bulb flared and held. Warm gold spilled across the wet concrete and the puddles glowed like shallow coins. The house didn’t look younger. It looked loved.
She touched my sleeve. “Looks nice,” she said.
We went inside and made coffee. The instant kind, bitter and thin. She opened a tin of sugar cookies shaped like pretzels and shells, the kind that used to come out at Christmas but now lives on the fridge all year. We sat at the Formica table and listened to rain talk to the gutters. She told me about Mrs. Delaney across the street and her knee replacement. I told her the truth about my job instead of the summary. She asked for a picture of my daughter in her soccer uniform and I showed her one where the socks didn’t match and she laughed.
On my way out, I reached for the notebook.
“May I?” I asked.
“To take?” she said, surprised.
“Just to make an entry,” I said. “Then I’ll put it back.”
She handed me a pen. I wrote the date. Then I wrote:
Porch light. Rain. Coffee. We counted the right thing.
She watched me write and nodded like a pastor offering a benediction. When I set the notebook on the hall table by Dad’s hat, she reached for my coat and smoothed the collar like I was eight and late for the bus.
At the door we paused, both of us looking at the new glow. The rain slowed to a mist. The yard smelled like wet dirt and memory.
“You know,” she said, “your father used to say a porch light isn’t for finding the house. It’s for telling someone they’re expected.”
I swallowed hard.
“I’ll be back Friday,” I said. “No errands. Just coffee.”
Her eyes shone, but she didn’t make a scene of it. “I’ll put the good cups out,” she said.
Driving home, I passed the shuttered Hudson’s distribution building where she once clocked extra shifts at Christmas. A For Lease banner drooped on the chain-link fence. The big-box electronics store glowed like a spaceship in the distance. I turned the radio to AM and let an old ballgame replay fill the car with summer. When I hit the freeway, I realized my shoulders had dropped. The day felt heavier and better.
The porch light in my mirror grew small and then disappeared. But I carried its color with me, the kind of warm that doesn’t come from a bulb at all.
Ending: Some lights say “Here I am.” The right ones say “I’m waiting for you.” From now on, I plan my days by that kind of brightness.
