The Roof My Shift Put On in a Day

That was his consequence. Nobody had to say a thing to him. He had to sit there and see it.

Around one o’clock, my daughter came across the yard to him with a paper plate. It had a ham sandwich on it and two pickles and a lemon bar. Tara had sent her. Or maybe she sent herself. I never did ask.

I couldn’t hear them from the roof. I could only see.

She held out the plate, and he took it, and she climbed up on the tailgate next to him the way she used to when she was small, and she started talking with her hands.

She talked a long time. He didn’t eat. He just held the plate.

Later, Tara told me what she’d said, because Dewey told Tara that night on the phone and he had to stop twice telling it.

She told him she had slept on the couch for six nights because her ceiling fell down. She told him it was like camping. She told him the water came right through her light.

And then she told him it was all right now, because Daddy’s work friends came, and Mr. Arlo let her help, and she had handed up forty-one shingles, she’d counted.

“So you don’t have to worry, Grandpa,” she said. “It’s fixed.”

That was what did it. He set the plate down on the tailgate and put his big hand on the top of her head, and he sat there with his eyes shut.

I watched his shoulders from the ridge and I looked away, the same as I’d done that morning.

A little after two, he got down off the tailgate and went and found Tara at the card table.

I came down for that. I didn’t want to, but I thought I should be there.

Cletus called a water break, which I think was on purpose, so the men were all standing in the shade and none of them were watching, which was its own kindness.

Dewey stood in front of Tara with his cap in his hands. He was a big man and he looked small just then.

“I was wrong,” he said. “I was wrong about the money and I was wrong about you two and I was wrong on the phone. I should have been up there a week ago. I let that little girl sleep on a couch over my pride.”

Tara didn’t say anything. Her chin was shaking.

“I told myself I owed him,” Dewey said. “And I do. But that’s my debt. I tried to make you pay it. That wasn’t right.”

“Dad,” Tara said.

“Your mother would have skinned me,” he said.

And Tara laughed, and cried, both at once, and he put his arms around her right there under the maple in front of eleven men and their wives. Nobody watched. Everybody saw.

Then he turned to me. He held out his hand. I took it. He has a grip like a bench vise.

“Brad,” he said. “I’m sorry, son.”

He had never called me son. Twelve years. Not once.

“Okay,” I said, because there wasn’t anything else that would come out.