The Roof My Shift Put On in a Day

He sat there a long time. Long enough that I thought he might back out and go. Long enough that Tara stopped wiping the card table and stood with the rag in her hand.

Then his door opened. He got out, slow, the way he does now with his knees, and he walked across the yard to the foot of the ladder.

He looked up at me.

I set down the bundle I was carrying, and I came down.

I’ll be honest. I didn’t know what he was going to say. Part of me was ready for him to tell me that every one of those men was doing it wrong. I had my jaw set for it.

He didn’t say anything at first. He stood at the bottom of the ladder with his hands in his back pockets and looked up at the eave.

“Who put your drip edge on?” he said.

“Cletus,” I said. “And me.”

“Ice and water under it at the eaves, or over?”

“Drip edge over the ice and water at the eaves,” I said, because Cletus had made me repeat it twice that morning. “Under the underlayment on the rakes.”

Dewey grunted. He walked along the side of the house to where the shingles came down closest to the ground, at the low corner by the porch, and he reached up and lifted the edge of one with his thumb.

He looked at the nails. He counted them, I think. Six per shingle, all set right on the line, none of them cocked.

He let it down. He did the same thing three feet over. Then again by the downspout.

Cletus had come to the edge of the roof above him. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there with his nail gun hanging from his hand, looking down at Dewey the way one tradesman looks at another.

“Six nails,” Dewey said, up to him.

“High wind country,” Cletus said. “Manufacturer says four. I put six.”

Dewey nodded. He looked at the chalk lines. He looked at the valley over the kitchen, where the shingles came together clean in a closed cut. He looked a long time at that valley.

“That’s right,” he said finally. It wasn’t loud. “That’s done right.”

Then he walked back to his truck and dropped the tailgate and sat down on it.

He didn’t leave. He didn’t say anything else. He just sat there on his tailgate in the sun and watched eleven men put a roof on his daughter’s house the way he would have put it on himself.

I went back up. I didn’t know what else to do. The afternoon was getting away from us and the back side wasn’t half done.

From up on the ridge I could see him. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his cap pushed back.

Every now and then a man would come down the ladder for a bundle and walk right past him. One or two nodded. Most didn’t. Nobody was rude. Nobody had to be.

I have thought a lot since then about what that hour must have been like for him.

A man who roofed for thirty years, sitting on his own tailgate in the yard of his only daughter, watching strangers do the job he’d refused, and do it the way he’d taught himself to do it.