Tillman Lumber
Tillman Lumber and Supply has stood on the corner of Main and Third since 1951, with a creaking floor, a bell on the door, and a coffee pot nobody has washed since the Truman administration. Lowell Tillman has run it for forty years. He is sixty-eight, with white eyebrows and forearms like fence posts, and he sold Dale every board and bolt Dale ever put in our house.
I went in on a Tuesday with a list on the back of an envelope. Three sheets of plywood, two rolls of tarp, a box of roofing nails.
He read it and looked at me. “Maureen, what are you building?”
“A patch. Lowell, who in this town still owns a ladder?”
“Most everybody. What happened?”
I put the contract and the folder on the counter. I meant to say I needed to show him the damage, but what came out was, “I had a man, Lowell. He took half the money and he’s gone.”
Lowell did not say anything. He turned the pages with one thick finger, slowly. He read the contract and the quote. Then he got to the sheet on the supplier’s letterhead, and he stopped.
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He held it up to the window and turned it over. “Maureen, I have bought from this company for twenty-two years.”
“Midland Building Supply?”
“Midland. Their man is Kenny Marsh, and he has walked into this store every other Thursday for years.” He set the paper down gently, the way you set down something that might bite. “That is not their letterhead. Their logo has a different roofline. This was printed on somebody’s home printer.”
“I’m going to call Kenny,” Lowell said. “Right now, if you’ll let me.”
He dialed from the phone on the wall. I stood by the nail bins and listened to half of a conversation.
“Kenny. Lowell. Do you have a customer named Koller Storm Restoration? … No account? Not ever? … Say it again so I know I heard it.”
He hung up and stood with his hand on the receiver.
“Never heard of him,” he said. “He never ordered your shingles, Maureen. He never planned to.”
I sat down on a nail keg. I do not recall deciding to. My legs did it. Lowell came around the counter and asked the one question nobody had thought to ask me.
“Who else did he talk to?”
I told him I did not want anybody told. I said it too fast, and too loud. I said I could not stand the way people looked at a woman at church when they thought she was being managed.
Lowell looked at me a long moment. “That’s fine,” he said. “I won’t tell a soul you said that.”
He sold me my plywood and tarps at what he had paid for them and loaded them into my trunk himself.
I know now what he did that afternoon. He called Dwight Strunk, who runs his two-man outfit out of the old Phillips station on Highway 50. He called Pastor Gil Haskell, and Wendell Brauer, a deacon who still holds the ladder at church when the bulbs go out.