The Roof Done by Dark

By nine the decking was bare. We found the soft spots where the old plank had rotted under the den, right where the water had come through, and Brian and Shane cut them out and laid in new sheets.

Dusty walked every inch of it before he let anybody roll out underlayment.

Around then the neighbors started coming out.

It is a short street, maybe eight houses, mostly people Gordon and Marlene’s age. Mr.

Hendricks from across the road brought out a folding lawn chair and set it at the edge of his yard and just sat there with his coffee, watching.

Two houses down, a man I did not know walked over and asked Dusty if we needed another set of hands, and Dusty put him on the trash.

About ten, Marlene came down the porch steps carrying that coffee can she had set out in the morning, and two more empty ones from her pantry.

She sat the girls on the top porch step, Ava on one side and Josie on the other, and dumped the bucket of nails Gordon had been collecting onto a sheet of newspaper between them.

“Your mommy used to do this for your Papa when she was your size,” she told them.

“Good nails in this can. Bent ones in this one. Rusty ones in that one. Papa saves the good ones for his shop.”

I stopped at the top of the ladder and watched. Ava took it very seriously, holding every nail up to the light and turning it.

Josie put every nail in the good can no matter what it looked like, and every time she did it, Ava took it back out and explained why.

They did that for most of an hour. When the newspaper was empty, Gordon came around and dumped another load out for them, and for just a second I saw his hand rest on the top of Josie’s head before he walked off again.

I had to go stand on the far side of the roof after that, where nobody could see my face.

By noon we had underlayment down across the whole roof and the starter course run on two sides. The sun was high and hot.

In western Oklahoma in May the wind can be cool in the morning and turn on you by lunch, and it had turned.

Kathy from next door showed up with a sheet cake and a cooler of sandwiches she said her church circle had made “on short notice,” which meant somebody had been on the phone since dawn.

The men ate sitting on the tailgates with their tool belts still on.

Marlene came out with a pitcher of iced tea and a stack of plastic cups and walked from tailgate to tailgate pouring.

She did not say much. She would fill a cup, hand it over, and say, “Thank you,” and the man would say, “Yes ma’am,” and she would move on.

When she got to me, she poured my cup, and then she stood there holding that pitcher with both hands for longer than she needed to.

“Ryan,” she said. Then she stopped. “Never mind. Later. You eat.”

I watched her walk back up to the porch. Gordon had come around the house finally and was sitting on the bottom step below the girls with a sandwich he was not eating.

Marlene sat down beside him. Neither of them looked at each other.

The afternoon went the way good afternoons on a roof go: steady, hot, nobody wasting a motion.