The Roof My Shift Put On in a Day

Dewey took his glasses off and folded them very slowly. “Who is he?”

She told him. Dewey had never heard of him, which in Dewey’s mind was the same as saying the man did not exist.

“Young?”

“Forty, maybe,” I said.

“Young,” Dewey said. “Young men cut corners. They staple instead of nail. They skip the ice and water at the eaves because the homeowner can’t see it. You’ll be calling me in three winters with water in your walls.”

“Then we’ll call you,” I said, trying to make it light.

He didn’t take it light. He stood up and pushed his chair in, square to the table, the way he always does. “You want cheap,” he said, “you’ll get cheap.”

And that was the end of the visit. He didn’t slam the door. He never slams a door.

I’ll say this for my wife. She didn’t fight him that day and she didn’t fight me after. She just stood at the sink a long time with her hands in the water and said, “He’ll come around. He always does when it’s done.”

The check was ours. The roof was ours. The bills were ours. And Dewey simply would not be told any of that. I had been married into that family twelve years and I had never once seen anyone tell him anything.

So we signed with the roofer from the next county. He gave us a date, the last week of June, and he seemed like a fair man. I put the insurance check in the bank and we waited.

Two weeks later he called me at work. I was halfway down a bucket elevator pit with a flashlight in my teeth, and I had to climb out to take it.

“Brad, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve got a school district two counties over that needs four buildings done before classes start. I can’t turn it down. It’s a year of work. I can’t get to you until October.”

I don’t hold it against him, not really. He had a crew to keep paid and a family of his own. But October was months off, and we had a tarp on a roof and a whole summer of storms coming.

I spent my lunch break that day calling every roofer in three counties. Every one of them was booked. Some were booked until September. One fellow laughed, not mean, just tired. “Mister, I’ve got ninety houses ahead of you,” he said.

There were storm crews in from out of state by then, the kind that knock on your door with a clipboard and a truck with plates from four states away.

A man at the plant had paid one of them half up front the week before. They had not come back.

I wasn’t going to do that. Not with Tara’s name on the check.

So I tarped it. I bought the heaviest tarp the farm store had, two by fours to batten the edges, and a box of cap nails. I spent a whole Sunday up there doing it right, or as right as I knew how.

It held for eleven days. Then came the Sunday storm, and the phone call, and my daughter on the couch watching the water come through the light.