The Tools He Worked Off

The first week

He showed up Monday at six. I half expected an empty driveway. He was standing at the end of it when my headlights swung in, hands in his pockets, breath showing in the cold.

I handed him a tool belt, an old one of mine, and a pair of gloves.

A bundle of architectural shingles runs about seventy to eighty pounds. There are a lot of bundles on a house. The job that week was a full tear-off and re-roof on a two-story over on Sycamore, and the way we do it, the helper humps the bundles up the ladder and stacks them on the roof for the rest of us.

Cody got about four bundles up before he had to stop and put his hands on his knees.

My other two guys, Marcus and old Pete, watched him and did not say anything. I had told them that morning, before he got there, the short version. This is Angie’s brother. He’s working off a debt to me. You treat him like a new hire, no better and no worse, and what’s between him and me stays between him and me.

Pete, who is sixty-one and has buried a brother to the same thing, just nodded. Marcus said, “He gonna make it up the ladder?”

“That’s up to him,” I said.

Cody made it up the ladder. Slow that first week. He threw up once, behind the dumpster, from heat and from a body still learning to be a body again, and he wiped his mouth and he got back on the ladder.

At the end of the week I did the thing I said I would do. I sat in the truck with my clipboard and I wrote it down in front of him. Thirty-eight hours. Five hundred seventy dollars. New balance, five thousand four hundred thirty.

He looked at that number a long time.

“It’s going down,” he said, like he was testing whether it was true.

“It’s going down,” I said.

I kept it on a legal pad in the truck door. I did not fancy it up. Date, hours, dollars, running balance, down the page in pencil.