The Saturday Thirty Men Brought Ladders

“I mean, I did. But I meant to make it good.” He rubbed his face. He was thirty-one. I could see it then, how young he was under the practiced face.

“My dad had a roofing company in Plano. Thirty years. Two bad hail seasons and it went under. He owed a supplier sixty-one thousand dollars, and they started calling my mother’s house. I took over the debt. I thought I’d work it off on storms.”

“With my money,” I said.

“The first ones I did right. Good roofs, I swear it. I put up four in Texas and the money went to the supplier. Then I fell behind, and I started using the new deposit on the old debt, and then I needed another deposit to cover that one. After a while it was just what I did. Go to the next town. Sit at the next table.”

“And call them Miss,” said Fern, from the swing. Her voice shook. “You called me Miss Fern. I’m eighty-one years old.”

He put his face in his hands.

I had been angry for ten days. I thought it would rise in me, hot and clean, the way it does in the movies. What I felt was tired, and a little sick, and sorry for all of us.

“Shane,” I said. “Look at me.”

He did.

“There are eight of us, and Fern makes nine. We all sat at our tables and wrote you checks because you were kind to us.” I waited. “Do you have any of it left?”

He did not answer for a while.

“There’s a bag under the seat,” he said at last. “It was going to the lender on Friday. Thirty-one thousand two hundred.”

“Get it.”

He looked up, startled.

“You have until that man comes across the street,” I said, and I tipped my head toward the unmarked car, where Sergeant Roper had already opened his door. “You can hand it over, or you can leave it. That’s all the choice you have left. But you get to make it yourself.”

I did not plan it. It was what Dale would have said, quiet and flat, the way he told a boy to go and own up to the neighbor about the window.

Shane Koller stood up and went to his truck. Nobody stopped him, not Dwight, not Lowell, not Wendell Brauer, though every man in that yard had his hands loose at his sides.

He came back with a zippered bank bag, white canvas, heavy. He did not hand it to me. He carried it across Fern Albright’s lawn to Sergeant Roper and held it out in both hands, the way he had once held out his hand on my porch.

“I’d like to turn myself in,” he said. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

The sergeant took the bag. He put the cuffs on, not roughly, and read the words, and it was over in under a minute. I thought I would feel something grand. I felt a draft.

“Maureen,” Sergeant Roper said, as he walked Shane Koller to the car. “He’ll be charged with felony stealing in this county, and I’d bet in two others. The money’s evidence now. The court will split it and order the rest. It won’t be quick, and it won’t be all of it.”

“I know,” I said.

He looked at the yard full of men, the women on the porch, and the old man in the lawn chair. “I want it on record that I did not set this up.”

“No, Sergeant,” said Merle Dunaway, without moving. “You sure did not.”

When the car had pulled away, Fern stood up from the swing. She went into her kitchen and came out with the check she had written, made out to Koller Storm Restoration for seven thousand two hundred dollars. She tore it in four pieces and handed them to Dwight, who did not know what to do with them and put them in his shirt pocket.

Then she sat back down and cried, hard, for about a minute and a half, and I held her hand.