The Pontoon Key on a Sparkler
The little house
Finding a house took the rest of July and most of August.
I sat with Paige and Logan at my kitchen table three nights a week, with a yellow legal pad and my calculator. We went through what they made, what they owed, and what a payment would really cost them once you put taxes and insurance on it.
Paige makes good money cleaning teeth in Jefferson City. Logan works on the home farm and drives a grain truck at harvest. Together they could carry a modest house, but not much more.
I took them to see Mark at our branch, the loan officer I trust. He sat with them for two hours one Tuesday evening after we closed, and he never once made them feel small.
They looked at eleven houses. Some were too far. Some had foundations that made Bill frown and shake his head. One had a basement that flooded every spring, and the sellers had painted the water line over.
Bill went to every single one of them. He brought a flashlight and a level and a screwdriver. He went into every crawl space on his back and came out with cobwebs in his hair.
“Not this one,” he would say quietly to Paige in the driveway. “Sills are soft on the north side. You’d be into it for eight thousand by Christmas.”
And Paige would nod, because she knew he was right, and we would go on to the next one.
The twelfth house was a little two-bedroom in Versailles, on a street with big maple trees and a church on the corner. It was built in 1958. It had hardwood floors under the carpet and a big backyard with a garden spot.
It also had a roof that was about twenty-five years old and leaked over the back bedroom.
“Roof’s shot,” Bill said, standing in the yard with his hands on his hips. “Whole thing needs tearing off. Decking too, over that back room.”
“How much?” Logan asked.
“From a roofer? Twelve, fourteen thousand,” Bill said. He looked at Paige. “From me and you, Logan, and a couple of your cousins? About four thousand in shingles and plywood and three Saturdays.”
Paige looked at me. I nodded. They made an offer that afternoon, a little under asking because of the roof, and the sellers took it.
The roof
They closed on the house in the second week of September. I went with them and sat in the back of the title office and watched Paige sign her name about forty times, and I did not cry until we got to the car.
Bill and Logan started tearing off the old roof the next Saturday at six in the morning.
Dale and Kenny came. Ron came. Three of the Teague cousins came. A man from Bill’s dealership came with a trailer for the old shingles. By eight o’clock there were nine men on that little roof in Versailles.
I made sandwiches. Lisa Teague made sandwiches. We set up the same picnic table, the one from the Fourth, in Paige’s new backyard, and we kept the iced tea coming.
Bill ran that roof like he had been born on one. He showed the cousins how to snap a chalk line and how to start the shingles straight on the first course, so the whole roof would be straight.
Around noon, I looked up and saw Bill and Ron Teague sitting side by side on the ridge, eating sandwiches, legs hanging over, talking about combines like they had known each other forty years.
“Look at them,” Lisa said, standing beside me with a pitcher. “You’d think they were brothers.”
“They’re going to be family,” I said. “Same thing, I guess.”
It took three Saturdays, just like Bill said. When the last ridge cap went on, he climbed down the ladder and walked across the yard to Paige, and he stood there in front of her, covered in grit and tar.
“That roof’ll go thirty years,” he said. “It’s the best thing I ever built.”
“It’s the best present anybody gave me,” Paige said.
“Better than the boat?” Bill said, and he looked over at me and grinned.
Paige thought about it. “Tie,” she said.
Then she hugged her daddy, tar and all, and ruined a perfectly good shirt.