The Roof We Closed in One Day
Then the shingles started going on.
The temperature had climbed to 43 with a wind out of the northwest, and Floyd squinted at the sky. “Those strips won’t seal in this cold,” he said. “Hand seal. A dab of cement under every tab corner on the first three courses and every course on the north slope, or the first big wind lifts them like playing cards.”
“That’ll add two hours,” Duane said.
“Then it adds two hours. Tell the young ones.”
I watched six men on that roof working in a rhythm I had known for thirty years and half forgotten. The pop of the coil nailer, four nails to a shingle. The scrape of boots on grit. Somebody’s radio tuned to the farm report.
At ten minutes after noon, a white pickup truck with a wrap on the door slowed on the gravel road and pulled in behind the last parked trailer.
I knew the truck before I read the door. Huber Roofing and Exteriors, in white letters, with a cartoon house and a little yellow sun.
The nailers on the roof stopped. Somebody up on the ridge said, “Well, I’ll be,” and not kindly. Down at the tables, a few of the men put down their sandwiches. Then, because there was still daylight and a wind coming, most of them went back to what they were doing, and the work picked up again around him, a little quieter than before.
Troy Huber sat behind the wheel for a long moment with the engine running. Then he turned it off and got out.
He looked bad, and I want to be fair and say so. He was not the smooth man from Mel’s kitchen table. His shirt hung on him, he had not shaved in days, and he walked across that gravel like a man who knew every pair of eyes in the yard. He took off his cap and stopped at the foot of my ladder.
“Loren,” he said. “I need to say something to your sister.”
My knees ached, my hands were black from the underlayment, and I had been angry at that man for eight days. I came down the last three rungs and stood an arm’s length from him.
“Ned called me,” he said. “He said if I had any decency left, I should come and look.”
“And?”
“I wanted to see it. Before I said anything.” He looked up at the roof. “I wanted to see what it looks like when somebody does it right.”
I thought about the roasting pan by her sink. I thought about every cruel thing I had planned to say to this man, in the truck, in the shower, in the dark, and I found I did not want to say any of it in front of those women with their roasters.
“She’s on the porch,” I said. “Come around the side.”
Rosalind did not get up.
She sat on the porch steps in Mel’s gray flannel with a coffee cup in both hands. Vera Gerber sat on the chair beside her with the baby on her lap. Ned Neuhaus had come around from the flatbed and stood at the corner of the house with his arms folded. Floyd came across the yard in his own time, using his clipboard like a cane, and eased down onto the bottom step. That was the whole of the audience, six of us. Everyone else in the yard was too far away to hear, which I believe Troy was grateful for.