The Roof We Closed in One Day
“Loren,” he said. “I was about to call your sister.”
“About what?”
“Troy ordered the materials for her job on the eighth. Seventy-eight bundles, the underlayment, the ice and water, the drip edge, all of it. It’s been sitting in my shed since the tenth with her name on the tag. He never picked it up. The last three checks he gave me bounced, $4100 between them, and I put his account on hold Thursday.”
I felt my jaw go tight. “So the shingles are sitting there.”
“Right where I left them. Materials didn’t go up on him. Shingles have moved maybe four percent since August. The man wasn’t short of shingles. He was short of money.”
“What do you want for them?”
“What I paid.” He gave me the figure, $3480 for everything, delivery included. “I’m not making a nickel off a widow. And Loren, she’s not the only one. He’s got a few more that I know of. I’ll tell you who when you’ve got a minute to write it down.”
I wrote it down that night at my kitchen table, with Jill reading over my shoulder. Vera Gerber on Elm Street, seventy-nine, who had paid Troy $3800 in August to replace six windows. He put in two, pulled the old frames out of the other four, and left plastic sheeting over the holes in September, and she was sleeping in her sweater, too proud to tell her son in Phoenix. Monte Pelzer, a retired feed salesman, with $2500 out on a garage roof that was never started. Josie Nagel, twenty-nine, who cleaned rooms at a motel off Highway 20 and had put $1900 down on gutters and soffit for a rental house she was fixing up, money she had saved over two years. And Floyd’s wife’s cousin in Vinton, $2800 for the barn.
That made five of them, and $17,000 in deposits. I put the page in my shirt pocket.
By Monday afternoon the rain had quit and the temperature had dropped to the middle thirties. I climbed up again, roped to the chimney, and pulled the tarp back a section at a time to see what the water had done.
The old 1962 decking on the south slope was plain one-by-six boards, and they had taken it well, a few gone soft at the seams where they had sat wet. The addition was another story. Mel and I had sheathed that in 1996 with seven-sixteenths strand board, and strand board does not forgive water. The edges swell, the surface goes soft and flaky, and the nails lose their grip. Nine sheets on the addition were gone, and three more near the back corner looked questionable.
That is when I found it.
I was at the back corner of the addition, over the bedroom, levering up the last sheet to see how far the water had run, when I saw writing on the top of the end rafter underneath, in pencil gone faded and gray. I recognized the handwriting before I could read the words, because I had watched that hand fill a hundred cut lists. Block capitals, slanted left, crossed sevens.
M.H. and L.A. raised this roof 6 15 96. Keep Roz dry.
I knelt there on a cold roof for a good while.