Chapter Thirty-Four

CHRIS IS ANNOYED at having to come downstairs and sign for everything when the UPS truck arrives. He was watching TV. The delivery guys have about ten boxes, and he tells them to put them in the wrapping room, down the hall from the front door and to the left. He misses the look they give him when he says wrapping room. It is there that Chris’s mother keeps gifts, and the necessary tape and ribbons and paper.

When the delivery guys are gone, Chris takes a steak knife from the kitchen and opens one of the boxes and pulls out a smaller box and opens it. It is a brass bell, flawlessly cast and with names engraved on it:

Jeff and Trina
Happy New Year

Chris holds it by the handle and flicks his wrist. A high clear note rings out in the silence of the house.

He looks through the boxes and finds more bells of different sizes with other people’s names engraved on them. He comes to the realization that his mother’s better friends, the people she is more interested in having as friends, get the bigger bells. He pulls out a big one and rings it with the smaller one and hears the deeper tones echo through the house. He can hold only one in each hand, but he takes out a dozen of them and lines them up on the wrapping table, then starts picking them up and playing them two at a time until he is in a frenzy and the big house is ringing with the sound of bells. And then his arms are tired and he lets the last note ring out and when it fades away finally, after a minute or two (for they are well-made bells), Chris heads upstairs to the television to kill the hours before he has to go to a cocktail party at his aunt’s house with his brother. It is one of their obligations, instead of taking out the garbage, maybe.