The Roof My Shift Put On in a Day

“I’m not climbing up there to fix your mistake,” my father-in-law said. “You made your bed, Brad. Sleep under it.”

I was standing in my daughter’s bedroom when he said it, holding the phone with one hand and a stock pot under a drip with the other.

The ceiling over her bed had a brown ring in it the size of a truck tire.

It was a Sunday afternoon in early July. The storm had come through right after church, hard and sideways, and it had peeled the tarp I put on our roof back like the lid on a sardine can.

“Dewey,” I said, “I’m not asking you to do the job. I’m asking you to help me tear it off so I can do it myself. You’ve got the ladders. You know how.”

“I know how,” he said. “That was the whole point. You didn’t want to hear from somebody who knows how.”

Then he hung up. Not mad. Just done. That was always the worst of it with Dewey Haase. He never raised his voice. He just closed a door and let you stand outside it.

My wife, Tara, had come in behind me. She took the phone out of my hand, looked at it like it belonged to somebody else, and set it face down on the dresser. Then she went and got a second pot.

Our daughter was sitting on the couch in the front room with her stuffed rabbit in her lap, watching the water come down through the hall light fixture.

She was eight. She didn’t say a word. She just pulled her feet up onto the cushion so they would not get wet.

I want to tell this right, so I have to go back a little.

My name is Brad Ostendorf. I’m thirty-nine. I’m a maintenance mechanic at a grain processing plant in central Illinois, which means I keep conveyors, pumps, dryers and elevator legs running for men who would rather not think about them.

I work rotating twelves. Some weeks I’m on days, some weeks I’m on nights, and you learn to sleep whenever the sun lets you. It’s honest work and it pays the bills, mostly.

Tara and I bought our place nine years ago.

It’s a small white farmhouse on four acres off a gravel road, with a porch on the front, a machine shed out back, and a garden Tara puts in every year whether the weather cooperates or not.

The house was built in 1948 and it has been patched by every owner since.

It’s about 2,000 square feet if you count the upstairs, which has a slant to the ceilings that makes me duck. We love it anyway. You love the house you can afford.

The hail came on a Tuesday in late May. It came in the middle of the afternoon, about four o’clock, out of a green sky that made the cattle across the road bunch up against the fence.

It lasted ten minutes. Some of the stones were the size of walnuts. I was at work, but Tara was home, and she said it sounded like somebody emptying gravel onto the house out of a truck.