The Roof We Closed in One Day
The phone rang at 1:40 in the morning, and I knew before I picked it up that it was Rosalind, because nobody else in my life calls me that late.
“Loren,” she said. “It’s coming through the ceiling.”
I was already sitting up. Jill put a hand on my back and said nothing, which is how forty years of marriage works at that hour.
“Where?”
“The back bedroom. The one you and Mel built. There’s a stain the size of a dinner plate and it’s dripping on the dresser. I put the roasting pan under it. It’s filling up.”
“Is it raining hard?”
“It’s raining like it means it. I called Troy three times. It went right to voicemail. Loren, he said he’d tarped it.”
“I’m coming. Don’t climb anything. Put every bucket you own under the drips and wait for me.”
I dressed in the dark. Jill had my thermos filled and my Carhartt on the chair before I got my boots laced. I took the truck with the ladder racks, two boxes of deck screws, a bundle of furring strips, and the biggest tarp I own, a 24 by 30 I bought for a job in 2011 and never used.
It is twenty-two miles from my place in Kingsley Creek to Corley, where my sister lives. I made it in nineteen minutes on wet gravel and I do not recommend it.
Let me tell you how we got there, because some of it does not make me look wise.
My sister Rosalind Hartig is fifty-eight. She taught third grade in the Corley school for twenty-six years and has the handwriting to prove it, round and even, every letter finished. Her husband Mel died in March. Pancreatic cancer, eleven weeks from the first scan to the funeral. Mel was a finish carpenter for a cabinet shop in Waterloo, a quiet man who kept his loose screws sorted by length in mason jars with the lids nailed to the underside of a shelf, and who never once lost a tape measure.
I did not start in the trades until I was thirty. Before that I ran the bagging line at the Farmers Co-op elevator, and it was Mel who got me on a framing crew in 1995. The next summer the two of us raised the back addition on his house, two weeks of evenings and weekends, with Rosalind bringing out sweet tea and complaining that we were slow. I have framed for thirty years now. That addition is the one job I would not let anybody else touch.
The house is a 1962 ranch, brick halfway up, about 2,400 square feet of roof counting the addition. The old shingles were the third layer, curling at the corners like burnt toast. Mel had been after that roof for two years. After the funeral, Rosalind decided to finish what he never got to.
I should have run that job myself. I am a framer, not a roofer, but I know enough to supervise. I did not, because I was drowning in my own work that month, and because Rosalind got three names off a church bulletin and a yard sign and picked the man who answered his phone.
His name was Troy Huber. Huber Roofing and Exteriors, with a truck wrap and a yard sign and a smile. He was about forty-five, well spoken, a little soft around the middle, with a habit of saying “ma’am” in every sentence. He sat at Mel’s kitchen table and quoted her $11,800 for a full tear-off, new underlayment, ice and water shield at the eaves, drip edge, thirty-year architectural shingles, and cleanup. It was maybe $900 high. I noticed, and said nothing, because she liked him.