The Saturday Thirty Men Brought Ladders

Ten Days of Excuses

The first of October was a Thursday. I got up at six, made coffee, and sat at the window in my robe.

By noon nobody had come. On Friday I texted him, politely, the way you would a plumber. At four he answered.

“Crew held up on a big job in Arkansas, Miss Maureen. Monday for sure. Thanks for your patience.”

I have kept that text. I read it more than I should.

Monday came and went. Tuesday I called four times and got a cheerful recording that said Shane would call back as soon as he was off the roof. On Thursday a woman’s voice told me the number was no longer in service, and I listened to it say so twice, because I could not make myself hang up.

That was the sixth of October. On the eighth, it rained for nine hours.

I counted four buckets, two stockpots, a roasting pan, and one mattress I dragged into the front room. I stood in the hall at two in the morning listening to water talk in five different places in my house. I cried a little, and then I got angry, and by morning I had a list.

I phoned every roofer in the county. Dwight Strunk, the only roofer in Lindell, was booked into March and sorry about it. A man in Tipton said June. The last one laughed, not unkindly, and said, “Ma’am, there are four thousand roofs open between here and the river.”

What the Lawyer Said

I did not call my son.

Mark lives in Phoenix. He is forty-four, a good man, and he calls every Sunday at four. Since Easter he has been telling me to sell the house and move out where the winters are kind and he can keep an eye on me.

I was not going to hand him that. I was not going to say, Mark, a stranger took thirteen thousand dollars off me, and now you get to be right. I would sooner have lived under the tarp.

So I called the sheriff’s office instead. A young deputy came that afternoon and wrote down Shane Koller’s name, the truck, and the text about Arkansas.

“Ma’am, I’m going to be honest with you,” he said. “You’re not the first. I can’t say more than that.”

That night I filled out a complaint for the attorney general’s office, a form with more boxes than I had patience for.

The next morning I saw a lawyer in California, the county seat. Ben Whitlock has an office over the florist, and he did Dale’s will. He listened with his hands folded, and when I was done he told me the truth, which is what I paid him forty dollars to do.

“Small claims in this state stops at five thousand dollars, Maureen,” he said. “Yours is thirteen and a half. That’s a real lawsuit, in circuit court, with filing fees and a process server.”

“Can’t we find him?”

“We can find a company on paper with a post office box in Texas. I’d want thirty-five hundred up front to start looking. If we find him, and we win, and he has the money, that’s three ifs. Then you wait a year and a half. Maybe two.”

I looked at the window behind him. It was raining again.

“My roof has about a month,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I wish I could tell you something else.”

I drove home slowly. There is no lawsuit in the world that gets a ladder up your wall by Thanksgiving. So I decided to patch what I could, and figure out how to climb a ladder at seventy with a bad right knee, because Dale was not coming, and neither was the man with the smile.