When I got home that evening I set a ladder against the eave and went up. The shingles looked like somebody had gone over every square foot with a ball-peen hammer. Bruises everywhere. Granules washed down into the gutters like sand.
Half the county got hit. You could drive any road that week and see roofs pocked gray and white, siding dented, car windshields starred. The body shop in town had a waiting list a page long by Thursday.
Our insurance adjuster came out the next Monday. He was a young fellow, polite, with a chalk stick and a little measuring wheel. He walked the roof, marked his test squares, counted the hits, and climbed down shaking his head.
“That’s a full replacement,” he said. “No question about it. You’ll get a check for the actual cash value, less your deductible. The depreciation we hold back until the work is done and you send us the invoice.”
I’m a mechanic, not an insurance man, so I made him say it twice. The way it works, they don’t pay it all at once.
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They pay you what the old roof was worth today, take your deductible out, and keep the rest until you prove the new one is on.
The first check came to $8,400. The rest, a little over $3,000, would come after. All in, it was a fair number for what we had. It was not a rich number.
Dewey came over the Saturday after the check came. He’s Tara’s dad. He’s sixty-four, retired after thirty years of framing and roofing houses all over that part of the state.
He has forearms like fence posts and he can still outwork most men half his age.
He sat at our kitchen table with a cup of coffee and read the adjuster’s paperwork line by line with his reading glasses down on his nose. He didn’t ask if he could. He just picked it up.
“My buddy will do it for fourteen thousand,” he said, and set the papers down. “Tear-off, new decking where you need it, the works. He’ll start whenever I tell him.”
Tara looked at me. I looked at the papers.
“Dewey,” I said, “the whole claim isn’t fourteen thousand. We’d be three thousand short at the end, and we’d be short the whole time we’re waiting on the second check.”
“You’d be getting a roof done right,” he said. “That’s worth three thousand.”
I knew the buddy. Everybody in Dewey’s world knew him. He and Dewey had roofed together back when they were young, and he was a decent man as far as I could tell. That wasn’t the trouble.
The trouble was the year Tara’s mother was dying. That was four years ago.
Dewey was still working then, and when she got sick he could not leave her, and his buddy finished three of Dewey’s jobs that fall and never sent him a bill.
Dewey never forgot that. I respected him for it. A man ought to remember who stood by him. But he had decided, somewhere along the line, that the way to pay that debt was with our roof and our money.
“We already have a bid,” Tara said quietly. “A fellow from the next county. He came out Tuesday. He’ll do it for what the insurance pays, and he doesn’t want a dime up front.”