The Roof Done by Dark

We tarped it and screwed plywood over the windows. Gordon helped me drag the wet drywall out to the curb.

He thanked me, shook my hand, and did not say one word about insurance. I had assumed, the way you assume the sun comes up, that a man like Gordon was covered.

So there I sat, across the table from him five days later, with that envelope out in my truck and Amanda’s voice in my head as plain as if she were standing at the stove.

Three weeks before she died, on one of her good afternoons, she had made me sit on the edge of the hospital bed and take her hand.

She had gotten very thin by then, but her grip was still strong. Farm girl hands, her daddy used to say.

“The policy,” she said. “Every dollar of it goes to Ava and Josie, Ryan. College, or a start on a house, or whatever they need when they’re grown. Not the shop. Not bills. Promise me.”

I had taken that policy out on her when Ava was born, a plain twenty-year term policy from the agent in Clinton, two hundred and fifty thousand, because a man who climbs on roofs for a living starts thinking about who pays for things when somebody is gone. I just never once thought the somebody would be her.

“I promise,” I told her. I said it before she finished the sentence, and she laughed a little and said, “Let me finish, you stubborn thing,” and then she finished, and I promised again.

Now her father was asking me for almost a quarter of it.

I want to be fair to myself, and I want to be fair to him. The policy was in my name.

Legally, it was my money, and I could have written Gordon a check that night and nobody alive could have said a word about it.

But I had promised Amanda every dollar would go to the girls, and I was not going to break the last thing she ever asked me for.

I also was not going to leave her mother and daddy sleeping under a blue tarp. I did not know yet how both of those things could be true.

“Gordon,” I said, “I can’t do that. That money belongs to Ava and Josie. I promised Amanda. I’m sorry.”

He nodded once, like a man who already knew the answer and had come anyway because there was nowhere else to go.

He picked up his cap, put it on, and stood. His chair scraped on the floor and it sounded very loud.

“I understand,” he said. “I shouldn’t have asked. Come on, Marlene.”

Marlene stood too. At the door she stopped and put her hand flat on my chest, the way Amanda used to when she wanted me to slow down.

Her eyes were red. She opened her mouth like she had something else to say, and then she closed it.

“You’re a good daddy,” she said instead. “She always said so.”

I watched their taillights go down our gravel road toward the highway.

Then I went and stood in the girls’ doorway for a long time, listening to them breathe, which is something I had started doing every night and did not know how to stop.

I did not sleep. Around two in the morning Ava padded out to the kitchen in her nightgown and found me at the table with a legal pad and a calculator.