The Roof Done by Dark

That spring we were six weeks behind with paying customers. Every storm season is like that; you have more work than daylight and everybody is mad at you.

I called the two families I had scheduled for Saturday and told them the truth, that we had a family emergency, and both of them said take the day.

One of them was crying by the end of the call because she had known Amanda from the school.

At nine I drove to the supply house in Clinton and ordered the shingles.

I picked a charcoal gray, close to what had been on there before, because Marlene does not like change and I did not want her looking up at her own house and feeling like she had moved.

Then I went by city hall in Cordell and paid for the reroof permit, because the last thing I needed was the inspector writing me up on my own mother-in-law’s house.

The lady at the counter had gone to school with Amanda. She stamped it and did not charge me, and when I argued, she said, “Hush, Ryan,” and slid it across.

At eleven I carried the envelope into the bank.

The banker was a woman named Kim who had handled our little business accounts for years. She already knew. Everybody already knew. She brought me a cup of coffee I did not drink and closed her office door.

I told her what I wanted. Every dollar of Amanda’s policy, split even between Ava and Josie, in accounts in their names that nobody could spend on anything but them.

Me as the custodian until they were grown, because somebody had to be, but not one cent going to the shop, the house, or me.

She walked me through it, the accounts, the papers, what the money could and could not be used for.

She asked if I wanted to keep anything back for myself, for a cushion. A lot of people do, she said, and there is no shame in it.

“No,” I said. “It’s theirs. Their mother said so.”

I signed my name more times than I have signed it in my life.

When it was done, Kim printed out two pages, one for each girl, and I sat there in her office and looked at Ava’s name and Josie’s name next to that number.

For the first time in twelve days I cried in front of somebody who was not family.

Kim handed me a box of tissues and looked out the window at the courthouse while I did it, which was the kindest thing she could have done.

That night, after the supply truck had dropped twenty-eight squares of shingles on pallets in the Ruhls’ driveway, I called Gordon.

I had told the driver to just drop and go. I figured Gordon would see the pallets and the dump trailer and work it out.

He had not called me, which told me he either had not seen them or did not know what to say.

He answered on the fifth ring. “Ryan.”

“We’ll be at your place at five thirty in the morning,” I said. “Me and Dusty and the whole crew. We’re putting your roof on.”

There was a long silence on the line. I could hear their television in the background, the weather, the same radar loops everybody in Oklahoma watches all spring.

“We can’t pay you for that,” he said finally. His voice was flat. “You know we can’t.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”