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“What’d you say?”
“I said I didn’t know.”
“You know.” He took a pen out of his shirt and wrote a number on a napkin and pushed it down the counter to her, and it was more than she’d made in a month in a press room. “Lauren’s shop has one, Pearl’s got one, and now the co-op wants one. Charge them that. It’s the co-op. They’ve got it.”
“That’s too much.”
“That’s the county rate.” Earl took his napkin back. “You’ll learn.”
Saturday the roof went on.
By seven there were four trucks in the Hardwick yard and a Boston girl in the wrong boots standing at the bottom of a ladder with her hand on it.
“You don’t have to hold that,” Jace said, from the top of it.
“I’m holding it.”
“It’s on the ground. It’s got feet. It’s a ladder.”
“I’ve seen men fall off ladders, Jace. In Boston. It’s not a thing I’m going to watch twice.” Addi didn’t look up. “You’ve dropped the hammer.”
“I know I’ve dropped the hammer.”
“Then come down and get it, I’m not leaving the ladder.”
He came down and got it. Their hands didn’t touch. He went back up. Sunny watched it from the porch step with a coffee, and beside her Lauren watched it too, and neither of them said a word.
At eleven Sunny went around the side of the house for the water jug and they were there, in the six feet between the wall and the tank, out of sight of the yard, and Jace had his hand on the back of Addi’s neck and his forehead on hers, and neither of them was saying anything, and Addi’s eyes were shut. Then they were open, over his shoulder, on Sunny.
Addi didn’t move. Jace didn’t know she was there.
“Not a word,” Addi said, quietly, and Sunny picked up the jug, and went back around the house, and didn’t say one.
Chase was on the ridge with a sheet of tin and an opinion, Jett on the other side with the nails, Dean walking the yard with Max in a sling telling him about fence. And the old man had come. He’d come in his truck and he hadn’t gotten out of it. He was sitting in the cab with the window down looking at his second son on a roof on his own ground, and he’d been sitting there an hour.
Brody came down the ladder at noon for water. He came across the yard to the step with tin dust on him and his shirt off and sat down beside her, and took her coffee, and drank it, and gave it back.
“Your father’s been in that truck since seven.”
“I know.”
“He hasn’t gotten out.”
“He’s not going to get out. He’s going to sit there till the last sheet’s on and then he’s going to drive home and say nothing at supper, and that’s the best thing that’s ever going to happen to me on this place, and I’m not going to spoil it by walking over there.” He looked at the truck. “Leave him be.”
“That’s Marge’s line.”
“It’s a good line. Marge has about four and she makes them count.” He got up. “Chase says two more hours. Then it’ll rain on tin and you’ll hear it, and you’ll find out I was right.”
“I’ll like it.”
“You’ll like it,” he said, “because you like everything about this place, you’re the only person in the county who does, Ed Hardwick’s own girls wouldn’t have it,” and went back up the ladder.
She sat on the step. The old man sat in his truck. At two the last sheet went on, and Chase stood on the ridge with his hat off and said, “There,” to nobody, the way he’d said it over the marks in the dust in October, and John Royston started his truck and drove out the gate without a word to anybody, and Brody, on the roof, watched him go, and didn’t wave, and didn’t need to.
Tuesday, nobody was watching.
Brody was at the tank, and Addi was at the ranch with Lara and the baby, and Lara had called Monday night to say that Addi had gone quiet since Saturday and did Sunny know why.
