The bucket went up swaying, the cider steaming in the morning air. Wayne caught it at the top. He drank half the cup. Then he reached into his pocket, found a dollar, folded it, and dropped it in the bucket.
It came down slow, turning in the sun, and landed in Glenda’s mittens.
“Thanks, Uncle Wayne!” she shouted.
“It’s a good price,” he shouted back. And he went back to work.
They finished the roof by the third Saturday of April. It rained on the Sunday after, a good hard rain, the ringing kind. I sat in the pew where Mrs. Alder’s husband’s hymnal had been soaked, and I listened to it fall on the new metal like a thousand quiet drums.
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Nothing dripped. Pastor Leon had put the buckets in the supply closet, and for the first time since I was a girl there was no plink under the hymns.
At the end of the service, the old church pianist, who had played for years with a plastic bag over her sheet music, stopped in the middle of the closing hymn and let the rain have the room. We all sat still and listened.
Wayne was in the back, near the door, with his hat in his lap. I turned to look at him and found him looking at the ceiling, and his lips were moving, and I do not believe he knew it.
Afterward, in the muddy lot, Glenda walked straight to him with a snickerdoodle wrapped in wax paper.
“It’s not for the roof,” she said. “That’s just for you.”
He took it. He did not say anything. He crouched down to her height, which with his knees took some doing, and put his forehead against hers for a moment.
Pastor Leon kept one of the old buckets. He planted red geraniums in it and set it by the front door of the church, where everybody walks in. I asked him why, and he said a building ought to remember what it was.
Glenda kept the lid of the coffee can, with her pencil totals still on it, all of them, from $64 to $3,100. She keeps it in her bedroom, on the shelf above the bed, next to a cookie cutter shaped like a star that was Lorraine’s.
She asked me the other night, at bedtime, whether Uncle Wayne would be okay.
I said I thought he would. I said grief is a thing you carry until somebody helps you set it down, and sometimes the somebody is nine years old and standing on a bucket.
She thought about that. Then she nodded, the way she does when a sum comes out.
“Mom,” she said, “next year, can we do a stand for the cemetery fence?”
“Which fence?”
“Aunt Lorraine’s. It’s got a post that’s leaning.”
I smoothed her blanket. I told her we would see how the cider held up. Then I turned off the light, and I sat for a long while in her doorway, listening to the quiet.
It was not the quiet of a house waiting for something to go wrong. It was the other kind, the kind I had waited a long time for, with the rain on a good roof somewhere in the dark and everyone I loved under it.