The Roof We Closed in One Day

He did not start with an excuse. I will give him that.

“Mrs. Hartig,” he said. “I took your money and I left you with an open roof, and I lied to you on a voicemail. I’m not going to look for a better word than that.”

Rosalind said nothing. She looked at him the way she looked at nine-year-olds who had broken something and not yet decided to say so, with a patience that was a lot harder to bear than yelling.

“I had a bad winter,” Troy said. “Then a slow summer. I was behind with Ned and behind with the bank, and I started paying the last job’s materials out of the next job’s deposit. Then the next one. By September I was doing it to stay open, and it was never going to come out even. When Ned put my account on hold, I sat in my truck outside your house for an hour and I couldn’t make myself walk up to the door. So I called when I knew you weren’t home.”

“Materials didn’t go up,” Rosalind said. It was the first thing she had said.

“No, ma’am. That was a lie.”

“Then say it to her.” She nodded at Vera. “She has two windows with plastic on them.”

Troy turned. Vera Gerber looked up at him over the baby’s head, a small woman in her church coat, and did not say a word either. He said it. He said it was a lie and he was sorry, and that he would put glass in her house, and Vera told him she would believe it when she saw it, and the baby chewed on a cinnamon roll and looked from one of them to the other.

I thought it would take longer than that. It did not. There was not much more to say.

Floyd Lundquist spoke from the step. He did not stand and he did not raise his voice.

“Troy, I’m going to read you something.”

He took the folded page I had given him that morning off his clipboard and unfolded it on his knee. He read it flat, like a man reading a grain ticket.

“Hartig, six thousand. Gerber, thirty-eight hundred. Pelzer, twenty-five hundred. Nagel, nineteen hundred. My wife’s cousin, twenty-eight hundred. That’s seventeen thousand in deposits, and none of it is shingles on a roof.” He looked up. “Ned has forty-one hundred in bounced paper on top of that, and Ned says he’ll wait his turn.”

“Yes, sir,” Troy said.

“You’ve got a pontoon boat on Facebook. You’ve had it up since September. You sell it Monday, for what it brings, and you bring me the number.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It goes to the ones who can least afford to be out. The girl with the gutters. The lady with the windows. The man with the garage. Then you go to work for my grandson, on Saturdays and any weeknight he has you, same laborer’s wage as the rest of his crew, and what you owe these people comes out of that, a little every month, until it’s paid. Duane keeps the book. You don’t touch it.”

Troy nodded. He looked as if he was trying to find something to say and could not.