The Roof My Shift Put On in a Day

That night was the first of six she slept on the couch. We moved her mattress out to dry and Tara put a sheet over the cushions and tucked her in with her rabbit, and she said, “It’s like camping, Mom.” She said it every night after that.

She never once complained. That was what got to me. Kids are supposed to complain. When a kid stops complaining, it means she has figured out that the grown-ups are already carrying as much as they can.

The ceiling over her bed sagged in a soft brown belly. I cut it out with a utility knife on Monday morning before work, and wet insulation came down in clumps. Up in the rafters I could see daylight through the boards.

I went to work that Monday on four hours of sleep and sat down at the break table at nine with a cup of the plant coffee, which tastes like it was made in a grain dryer.

There were six or seven of us there. It’s a long table in a block room off the control room, with a microwave nobody cleans and a bulletin board nobody reads.

The men on my shift are farm kids and ex-Army and a couple of welders who came over from the railroad.

Somebody asked how the house was holding up, because they knew about the hail. Everybody’s place had taken some.

I meant to say fine. I didn’t. I told them the whole thing, flat, the way you’d tell a man how a gearbox failed.

The bid. The buddy. The roofer who backed out. The tarp. My daughter on the couch. What Dewey said on the phone.

I didn’t ask anybody for anything. I want that understood. It just came out of me, because I had been holding it for a week and there was nowhere else to put it.

Nobody said anything for a minute. A couple of the younger fellows looked at their phones.

Then Cletus set his coffee down.

Cletus has been a millwright at that plant for twenty-six years. He’s in his fifties, bald as a doorknob, with a gray mustache and hands that look like they were made out of the same steel he works on.

Before the plant, every summer from the time he was sixteen until he was thirty, he roofed.

“How big is the house?” he asked.

“About 2,000 square feet. One layer to tear off. Twelve pitch on the front, shallower on the back porch.”

“Decking?”

“Board decking. One-by-sixes. A couple of them are going to be soft over my daughter’s room.”

He nodded like I’d told him the size of a bearing. “Saturday,” he said. “We’re all off Saturday. Sunup. You get a dumpster and you get the shingles. We’ll bring the rest.”

I started to say he didn’t have to. He held up one hand.

“Brad,” he said, “I’ve got a granddaughter that age.”

That was all he said about it. Then he picked his coffee back up and asked somebody about the Cardinals.

By the end of that shift I had a list on the back of a work order. Nine names, then ten, then eleven.

Men I’d worked beside for years and men I barely knew. One of them was a welder named Arlo who’d been at the plant less than a year.