The Roof My Shift Put On in a Day

My daughter had gotten dressed by then. She came to the bottom of the ladder in her tennis shoes and a T-shirt that said something about her softball team, and she looked up at me.

“Dad,” she said. “Can I help?”

I was going to say no. I was going to say it was too dangerous, go help your mom. But Arlo was halfway up the ladder with a few loose shingles under his arm for the ridge, and he stopped.

“She can hand me these,” he said. “I’ll stay right here.”

So he stood on the ladder about six feet up, and she stood on the bottom rung with one hand on the rail, and Tara handed her shingles one at a time off the stack, and she handed them up to Arlo, one at a time.

And every single time, Arlo said, “Thank you, ma’am.”

Every time. Twenty, thirty, forty times. “Thank you, ma’am.” And she said “You’re welcome” every time, very serious, like she was running the whole job.

I had to stop and look the other way for a while. I had a bundle on my shoulder and I just stood there at the ridge looking out over the bean field until it passed.

That was my girl who had slept on a couch for six nights and called it camping.

And here was a welder I barely knew, who had driven forty minutes on his day off, thanking her like she was the one doing him a favor.

At noon Tara rang the old dinner bell on the porch post. It hadn’t been rung in years. Every man on that roof stopped and laughed and started climbing down.

We ate under the maple. Ham sandwiches and turkey sandwiches and potato salad and somebody’s pickles and three pans of bars.

Before anybody ate, one of the older men took his cap off and said a short grace, just a sentence, and every man took his cap off with him.

It was right about then, with my mouth full, that I heard a truck slow down out on the road.

I knew the sound of it before I looked. Dewey drives a work truck older than our marriage, and the muffler has a little tick in it that I could pick out of a parade.

He slowed almost to a stop at the end of our drive. Then he turned in.

He pulled up behind the last pickup in the line and shut it off. And then he just sat there, with both hands on the wheel, looking up at the roof.

I had gone back up by then to grab my water jug. I was standing on the ridge, so I could see him plain through his windshield.

Nobody at the card table said a word. Nobody waved. The wives went on putting the lids back on the bowls.

A couple of the men glanced over and then glanced away, the way you do when somebody else’s family business shows up in the yard.

Cletus wiped his hands on a rag and climbed back up the ladder. He picked up his nail gun. After a minute, the rest of them did the same.

Eleven men went back to nailing while Dewey sat in his truck.