He could not walk back to the house, but he could always walk to his wife, and so he called out to her and strode on trembling, uncertain legs toward where she waited for him.

  “Here’s a coat,” she said. “If you don’t have the brains to stay indoors, at least wear the coat. I don’t want to have to bury you in the back yard, not till the landscapers come in the spring, anyway.”

  He took her teasing with good cheer, as he always did, but all he could really think about was the impossibility of telling her what he needed to tell her. It was so hard to think of the words. So hard to know how to begin.

  “So can I stay out here and talk to you?” said Lucille.

  He nodded.

  “The house is too big, isn’t it,” she said. “That missionary has told you about poverty and you took the news as if you’d never heard of it before and now you feel guilty about living here.”

  As so often before, she had guessed enough about what was in his heart that he could say the rest himself. “It wasn’t the boy, what he said. I was already unhappy here, I just didn’t know it.”

  “So what do we do, Helaman? Sell it?”

  “Everybody will think we built a house bigger than we could afford and had to sell it.”

  “Do you care?”

  “There’ll be rumors that Willkie Housewares is in financial trouble.”

  “It’s not a corporation. The stock won’t drop in value because of a rumor.”

  “The kids will never forgive me.”

  “That is possible.”

  “And I don’t know if I could ever look myself in the eye, if I gave you a kitchen like that and then took it away because of some crazy idea that living here means I’m ashamed of my father.”

  “Your father loves this house, Helaman, he’s been over here a dozen times during the building of it, and if he hadn’t promised your sister Alma that he’d spend Christmas with her family in Dallas he’d be here with us tonight.”

  “What about you?”

  “Moving is a pain and I won’t like doing it twice,” she said. “But you already know that I never wanted a house this big.”

  “But I wanted you to have it. I wanted you never to be like my mother, living in a ward where all the other women looked down on her, raising a family with no money in a tiny house.”

  “Our old house wasn’t tiny, it was just small.”

  “You love the new kitchen. I don’t want you to give up the new kitchen.”

  “You sweet, foolish man, I love the kitchen because you took so much care to make it perfect for me.”

  “I’ll give it all up,” said Helaman. “Because I can’t live with myself if I stay in a place like this. But how can I take it away from you and the kids? Even if you didn’t really want it, even if you never asked for it, I gave it to you anyway and I can’t take it back.”

  “So, will you rent an apartment near the main store and come visit us on weekends? Helaman, I couldn’t bear it if this house came between us. Why do you think I didn’t try to stop you from building it? Because I knew you wanted it so much, you were so hungry for it—not for yourself, but to give it to us. You needed so much to give this to us. Well, you have given it to us, and the kids and I love it. You meant to build it for the best motives, and as soon you realized that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, you were filled with remorse. The Lord doesn’t expect you to sell it and live in a tent.”

  “Sell all you have and give it to the poor and come follow me,” Helaman quoted.

  “That was what he said to a rich young man. You’re middle-aged.”

  “And you’re just saying whatever you think will get me back into the house where it’s warm.”

  “Well, what are you going to do, then? Never come back inside again?”

  To Helaman’s surprise, he found tears running down his cheeks, his face twisting into a grimace of weeping. “I can’t,” he said. “If I go back inside then it means I’m just like them.”

  “So don’t be just like them,” said Lucille, putting her arms around him. “You never have been just like them, anyway. You’ve never run your business the way they do—you’ve been fair and even generous with everybody, even your competitors, and everybody knows it. There’s nobody in the world who resents your having this house—your employees love you because they know you’ve paid them more than you had to and made less profit than you could have and you work harder than any of them and you forgive them for mistakes, and every one of them is glad for you to finally move out of that house that we’ve stayed in since 1975. Most of them don’t understand why it took us so long to move. You can live in this house with a clear conscience. You’re not like the rest of these people.” She looked up and down the street. “For all we know, half of them might not be like the rest of these people.”

  “It’s not about them or what anybody else thinks,” said Helaman. “I just can’t be happy there. It’s like what that missionary said. Tom, right? He said, ‘I just can’t live in America anymore.’ Well, I just can’t live in that house.”

  Lucille stood there in silence, still holding him, but not speaking. Helaman was still full of things to say, but it was always hard for him to talk about things inside himself, and he was worn out with talking, and even though he had stopped weeping now, he was afraid of feelings so strong that they could make him cry. So the silence lasted until Lucille spoke again.

  “You can’t sell the house,” said Lucille. “It won’t be a poor person who buys it, anyway.”

  “You mean I should give it away?”

  “I mean we should give it away in our hearts.”

  He laughed. He remembered the testimony meeting where Sister Mooller, who had more money than General Motors, had gotten up and said that thirty years ago she and her husband had decided to consecrate all they had to the Lord, and so they gave it away “in their hearts,” which was why the Lord had blessed them with so much more in the years since then. Whereupon Lucille had leaned over to him and whispered, “I guess the Lord really needed that new Winnebago they bought last month.”

  “Don’t laugh,” said Lucille. “I know you’re thinking about Sister Mooller, but we could really do it. Live in the house as if it weren’t our own.”

  “What, never unpack?”

  “Listen to me, I’m being serious. I’m really trying to find a way for you to have all the things that you want—to give this house to us, and yet not be the kind of man who lives in a big fancy house, and still keep the family living under one roof.”

  “That is the problem, isn’t it.” He felt so foolish to have gotten himself into such a twisted, impossible set of circumstances. No matter what he chose, he’d feel guilty and ashamed and unhappy. It was as if he had deliberately set out to feel unrighteous and unhappy no matter how things turned out.

  “Let’s consecrate this house to the Lord,” said Lucille. “We were going to dedicate it tomorrow, anyway, as part of Christmas. Well let’s do it tonight, instead, and when we dedicate it let’s make a covenant with the Lord, that we will always treat this house as if others have as much right to use it as we do.”

  Helaman tried to think of how that would work. “You mean have people over?”

  “I mean keep watching, constantly, for anybody who needs a roof over their heads. Newcomers who need a place to stay while they’re getting settled. People in trouble who have nowhere else to turn.”

  “Bums from the street?”

  She looked him in the eye. “If that’s what it takes for you to feel right about this house, and you’ll be here at night to make sure that the family is safe, then yes, bums from the street.”

  The idea was so strange and audacious that he would have laughed, except that as she spoke there was so much fire in her eyes that he felt himself fill with light as well, a light so hot and sweet that tears came to his eyes again, only this time not tears of despair and remorse but rather tears of love—for Lucille, yes, but more than for her. There were words ringing in his ears, words that no one had said tonight, but still he heard them like the memory of a dear old friend’s voice, whispering to him, Whatever you do to help these little ones, these humble, helpless, lonely, frightened children, you’re doing it for me.

  And yet even as he knew that this was what the Savior wanted him to do, a new objection popped into his mind. “There are zoning laws,” he said. “This is a single-family dwelling.”

  “The zoning laws don’t stop us from having visitors, do they?” said Lucille.

  “No,” said Helaman.

  “And if somebody stays very long we can always tell Sister Barnacuse that they’re faux relatives.”

  Helaman laughed. “Right. We can tell her that we’ve got a lot of brothers and sisters who come and visit.”

  “And it’ll be the truth,” said Lucille.

  “This can’t be one of those resolutions that we make and then forget,” he said.

  “A solemn covenant with the Lord,” she said.

  “It isn’t fair to you,” said Helaman. “Most of the extra work of having visitors in the house would fall to you.”

  “And to the kids,” she said. “And you’ll help me.”

  “It has to be like a contract,” said Helaman. “There have to be terms. So we’ll know if we’re living up to the covenant. We can’t just wait for people in need to just happen along.”

  “So we’ll look for them,” said Lucille. “We can talk to the bishop to see who’s in need.”

  “As if anybody in this ward is going to need a place to stay!”

  “Then we’ll ask him to talk to the stake president. There are other wards in this stake. And people you’ll hear about at work.”

  “Someone new every month, unless the house is already full,” said Helaman.

  “Every month?” said Lucille.

  “Yes.”

  “Like home teaching?” she asked.

  It was a sly jab indeed, for she well knew how many times Helaman had come to the end of the month and then would grab one of his sons and run around the ward, trying to catch their home teaching families and teach them his famous end-of-the-month procrastination lesson. “Even when I’m late, I do my home teaching.”

  “If you think you can find somebody every month, then that’s the covenant,” said Lucille. “But you’re the one who’ll have to take the responsibility for finding somebody every month, because I don’t get out enough.”

  “That’s fine,” said Helaman.

  “And if we find that we can’t do it,” said Lucille, “that it’s too hard or it’s hurting our family, what then?”

  “Then we sell all we have and give the money to the poor,” said Helaman.

  “In other words,” said Lucille, “if we can’t make this work, then we move.”

  “Yes.”

  It was agreed, and it felt right. It was a good thing to do. Hadn’t his own parents always had room on the floor for somebody to lay out a sleeping bag if they had no other place to stay? Hadn’t there always been a place at his parents’ table for the lonely, the hungry, the stranger? With this covenant that he and Lucille were making with the Lord, Helaman could truly go home.

  And then, suddenly, he felt fear plunge into his heart like a cold knife. What in the world was he promising to do? Destroy his privacy, risk his family’s safety, keep their lives in constant turmoil, and for what—because some missionary cried over the poverty in Colombia? What, would there be a single person in Colombia who’d sleep better tonight because Helaman Willkie was planning to allow squatters to use his spare bedrooms?

  “What’s wrong?” asked Lucille.

  “Nothing,” said Helaman. “Let’s get inside and tell the kids before we freeze.” Before my heart freezes, he said silently. Before I talk myself out of trying to become a true son of my father and mother.

  They opened the door, and for the first time, as he followed Lucille onto the marble floor, he didn’t feel ashamed to enter. Because it wasn’t his own house anymore.

  Joni was all for having Var stay through the whole rest of the Christmas Eve festivities, but Helaman politely told Var that this was a good time for him to go home to be with his family. It only took two repetitions of the hint to get him out the door.

  They gathered in the living room and, as was their tradition on Christmas Eve, Helaman read from the scriptures about the birth of the Savior. But then he skipped ahead to the part about Even as ye have done it unto the least of these, and then he and Lucille explained the covenant to their children. None of them was overjoyed.

  “Do I have to let them use my computer?” asked Steven.

  “They’re family computers,” said Helaman. “But if it becomes a problem, maybe you can keep one computer in your room.”

  “It sounds like this is going to be a motel,” said Trudy. “But I’m going to college after this year and so I don’t really care.”

  “Does this mean I can’t ever have my friends over?” asked Ryan.

  “Of course you can,” said Lucille.

  Joni had said nothing so far, but Helaman knew from the stony look on her face that she was taking it worst of all. So he asked her what she was thinking.

  “I’m thinking that somehow this is all going to work around so I have to share my bedroom again.”

  “We have spare bedrooms coming out of our ears, not to mention a whole mother-in-law apartment in the basement,” said Helaman. “You will not have to share your room with anybody.”

  “Good,” said Joni. “Because if you ever ask me to share my room, I’m moving out.”

  “We don’t make threats to you,” said Lucille, “and I’d appreciate it if you’d refrain from making threats to us.”

  “I mean it,” said Joni. “It’s not a threat, I’m just telling you what will happen. I waited a long time to have a room of my own, and I’ll never share my bedroom again.”

  “We’ll be sure to warn your boyfriends that your husband is going to have to sleep in another room,” said Trudy.

  “You aren’t helping, Trudy,” said Lucille.

  “Joni,” said Helaman, “I promise that I’ll never ask you to share your room with anybody.”

  “Then it’s OK with me if you want to turn the rest of the house into a circus.”

  For a moment Helaman hesitated, wondering if this was, after all, such a good idea. Then he remembered that Joni had brought home tonight a boy who was attractive to her only because his father was famous and he drove a Jaguar. And he realized that if he let Joni live in this house, in this neighborhood, without doing something to teach her better values, he was surely going to lose her. Maybe opening up the house to strangers in need would give her a chance to learn that there was more to people than how much fame and wealth they had. Maybe that’s what this was all about in the first place. He had wanted this house to be a blessing to his family—maybe the Lord had shown him and Lucille the way to make that happen.

  Or maybe this would cause so much turmoil and contention that the family would fall apart.

  No, thought Helaman. Trying to live the gospel might cause some pain from time to time, but it’s a sure thing that not trying to live the gospel for fear that it might hurt my family will certainly hurt them, and such an injury would be deep and slow to heal.

  As he hesitated, Lucille caught his eye. “The stockings seem to be hanging in front of the fireplace,” she said. “All we need to do now is have our family prayer and bring presents downstairs to put them under the tree.”

  “You aren’t going to make us give away our presents, are you, Dad?” asked Ryan.

  “In fact, that’s why we all got lousy presents for you this year, Ryan,” said Helaman. “So that when it’s time to give them away, you won’t mind.”

  “Da-ad!” said Ryan impatiently. But he was smiling.

  Instead of their normal Christmas family prayer, Helaman dedicated the house. In his prayer he consecrated it as the Lord’s property, equally open to anyone that the Lord might bring to take shelter there. He set out the terms of the covenant in his prayer, and when he was done, the children all said amen.

  “It’s not our house anymore,” said Helaman. “It’s the Lord’s house now.”

  “Yeah,” said Steven. “But I’ll bet he sticks you with the mortgage payments anyway, Dad.”

  That night, when the children were asleep and Helaman and Lucille had finished the last-minute wrapping and had laid out all the gifts for the morning, only a few hours away, they climbed into bed together and Lucille held his hand and kissed him and said, “Merry Christmas and welcome home.”

  “Same to you and doubled,” he said, and she smiled at the old joke.

  Then she touched his cheek and said, “All the years that I’ve been praying for another child, and all the years that the Lord has told us no, maybe it was all leading to this night. So that our lives would have room for what we’ve promised.”

  “Maybe,” said Helaman. He watched as she closed her eyes and fell asleep almost at once. And in the few minutes before he, too, slept, he thought of that Colombian family he had imagined earlier. He pictured them standing at his door, all their possessions in a bag slung over the father’s shoulder, the children clinging to their mother’s skirts, the youngest sleepy and fussing in her arms. And he imagined himself holding the door wide open and saying, “Come in, come in, the table’s set and we’ve been waiting for you.” And Helaman saw his wife and children gather at the table with their visitors, and there was food enough for all, and all were satisfied.

  Neighbors

  “Oh, it’s so good to sit down and rest!”

  “Tell me about it. My joints ache so much all the time that look at me, I can’t even stand up straight. But you, you’re gallivanting all over the place—”

  “Just to the city, you old exaggerator. Just for the holy days.”

  “The city! I haven’t been able to go in years. Not that anything ever changes.”