Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Reed
Icheck into a hotel an hour outside Bear Claw Junction and just stand there, overnight bag still dangling from my hand. The place smells like someone tried to drown mildew in lemon cleaner, and the air conditioner sounds like a rock band composed of three-year-olds is living inside it.
I drop the bag on the luggage rack and fish out my phone. Annie’s name is right there in my contacts, waiting. My thumb hovers, but I don’t call. She wanted space. She didn’t ask for me to chase her to Tennessee.
Still, knowing she’s here and I’m not with her feels worse than Stanhope ever did. At least at Stanhope, I can reason with the distance. Here, the only thing keeping me from her is my own restraint, which is questionable.
She’s out there somewhere, working, eating, sleeping, piecing herself back together in a place I can’t see unless she decides to let me.
By noon, I’m in the car, driving past Lanie’s place like a stalker.
When I don’t see Annie’s car, I pull into Lanie’s drive. The first thing I see is the roof.
The back half of the house is stripped bare, more than any roof should be unless someone’s actually fixing it.
Blue tarps are stretched and pinned down with boards, but the rain’s found every weak spot anyway.
Bundles of shingles huddle under plastic by the fence.
Torn roofing and busted porch boards are stacked beside the drive, like whoever started the job just walked off halfway through.
Lanie opens the front door before I knock. “You missed her. Not that she’d probably appreciate you just showing up here like this.”
“The only reason I pulled in is because her car wasn’t here. I just wanted to hear from someone who’s seen her that she’s okay.”
“You could have called for that.”
“I could have,” I say, and sigh. “What’s going on with your roof, Lanie?”
She watches me for a minute before she answers.
“It looks worse than it is,” she says.
“Not so sure that’s true. No disrespect.”
She gives me a look that could peel paint. Luckily, I’m too raw to care.
I step up to the edge of the porch. The boards in the far corner are raw and splintered, like they’ve been gnawed. There’s a bucket just inside the door, catching a slow, steady drip from the ceiling. Another brown stain is spreading across the plaster near the hallway.
“What happened?”
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
“Lanie.”
She stares at me for a long moment, then looks past me at the mess in the yard. “Dwight Pritchett. That’s what happened.”
The name means nothing to me. It will in about ten minutes.
She tells it briskly, as if speed can make it less humiliating.
Local contractor. Eight thousand dollars for roof and porch work.
He started demolition, tore off enough to expose the attic, which means the ceilings are now exposed.
Then he just stopped showing up. He quit answering calls right before three days of rain rolled over the mountains.
“Does Annie know?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because that girl is carrying enough already.”
I look again at the tarps, the damp wood, and the bucket inside the door. “You can’t manage this alone.”
Her chin lifts. “I’m managing fine enough to keep Annie from taking on another problem.”
Well, at least now I know where Annie gets it from.
“What do you have?” I ask.
“Excuse me?”
“Contract. Receipts. Canceled checks. Texts. Photos before and after he started. His full name, phone number, business name. Anything.”
Her eyes narrow. “Reed Dillon, if you think you’re about to come in here and throw money around?—”
“I think a man took eight thousand dollars from you and left your roof open to the rain.”
“Anyone ever told you I’m a stubborn old coot?”
“Anyone ever told you that I’m more stubborn than an old coot, whatever that actually is?”
She studies me, then turns and walks inside. “Fine. Wipe your feet on the mat.”
By two-thirty, Dwight Pritchett coughs up the money. It’s embarrassingly easy, which only pisses me off more.
I call an attorney I trust in Asheville, then send every photograph, text, receipt, and half-signed scrap Lanie has saved in a floral folder by her microwave.
He makes the calls. A formal demand letter goes out by email.
Pritchett gets slammed with words like fraud, breach, licensing complaint, insurer notice, and county permit office in the same afternoon.
Men like him count on people being tired, embarrassed, and too short on time to chase them.
Lanie stands at the kitchen counter when the confirmation comes through, one hand pressed flat beside her old coffeemaker. “He’s sending it back?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
For a second, the hard line of her mouth slips. She looks older than I’ve ever let myself admit. Then she glances up at the ceiling, at the brown stain bleeding out at the edges. “Money doesn’t put a roof back on.”
“Not automatically.”
“Dwight’s crew is gone. Weather’s coming again. Everybody decent is booked out for weeks.”
This is the part I can’t fix with a phone call or a family name. I look out the kitchen window at the exposed beams. “Who can get a crew out here today?”
Lanie doesn’t hesitate. “Jackson Boone.”
Of course. I picture him in Lanie’s drive, clipboard in hand, looking like he actually knows what he’s doing.
Local. Capable. Already woven into the life Annie’s building while I’m still standing outside, trying to find the door.
I can't help but wish she’d said any other name.
Then I look at the bucket under the leak.
“Give me his number.”
Jackson answers on the second ring. “Boone.”
“This is Reed Dillon.”
A pause. Not long enough to be rude. Long enough to place me. “What can I do for you?”
I explain Lanie’s roof. I keep Annie out of it except where the connection is unavoidable. Jackson asks three questions, all practical: How much is exposed? Any active leak into electrical? Any visible rot?
“I can get two of my guys there in forty minutes,” he says. “I’ll call Burt from Mountain Ridge Roofing. If he can spare anybody, we’ll get it workable today and see what needs replacing.”
“I’ll cover whatever it costs.”
“Understood.”
There’s no contempt in it. That almost makes it worse. I have nothing to push against.
“Thank you,” I say.
“We’ll see what we’re dealing with when we get there.”
He hangs up first. I stand in Lanie’s kitchen with the phone still in my hand, swallowing all the questions I don’t get to ask. How often do you see my wife? Does she smile when she talks to you? If she talks to you, does she ever mention me? I put the phone in my pocket.
Lanie watches me over the rim of her mug. “You look like you just swallowed shit.”
I nearly laugh.
“I kind of did.”
“Hm.” That’s all she gives me.
By four, I’m filthy and useless. Burt shows me how to carry shingles without crushing my fingers, but I still manage to do it wrong.
Someone else warns me to watch my step unless I want to put a boot through Lanie’s ceiling.
I pull nails too slow, drag rotten boards to the scrap pile, and haul torn roofing down from the porch, stacking it wherever I’m told.
My hands quit before my pride does. Turns out, weight bars in a gym don’t mean much when wet lumber grinds grit into your palms and old tin slices a raw line under your thumb. The work gloves someone loaned me help, but only so much.
I keep going. Not because the pain means anything. It doesn’t. The way I see it, if I can help any little bit, Lanie’s ceiling might just make it another week or two.
Jackson arrives a little after five, still in work pants and a gray shirt darkened at the collar from some other job. He climbs the ladder without hesitation.
I’m halfway through prying up a warped board when he crouches near me. “That one’s tied into the old porch framing. Don’t lever against the good beam.”
I stop. “Show me.”
He does. No smirk. No performance. His hand closes over the tool, angling it right and saving me from damaging the only piece of wood in this section still worth keeping.
“Got it,” I say.
He watches me try, then nods once. “Close enough. Take your time.”
I almost laugh. Nothing about me is moving fast today.
We work side by side for a while, though that phrase gives me too much credit. He works. I haul. Jackson inspects what can be saved, while I carry what can’t.
At one point, Jackson points toward the seam where the tarp failed. “Water ran under there first. If she’d had one more hard storm, she’d have lost that back room ceiling.”
My jaw tightens. “Can you stop it?”
“Yeah.” The answer is plain. No flourish.
I nod. The question I want to ask is right there, but I don’t ask it.
Jackson wipes his forearm across his brow. “Hand me that pry bar.”
I hand it over. That’s all.
Lanie corners me by the porch steps while the crew eats biscuits and ham out of a paper sack she left on the railing. I’m at the outdoor spigot, trying to scrub black grit off my hands. Cold water hits the raw cut under my thumb, and my fingers jerk.
“Don’t think fixing my roof buys my niece back,” she says.
I turn off the water. “That’s not why I’m doing it.”
She waits.
I dry my hands on my jeans because the towel she gave me is already ruined. “I’d do this if Annie never spoke to me again.”
Lanie’s face doesn’t soften, but something in her eyes shifts.
“You’ve been family for eight years,” I say. “Annie loves you. That’s enough.”
She studies me closely. “Why are you really here, Reed?”
The old answer would have probably been my saying something like, “I’m trying to fix what I did wrong.”
Instead, I go with the truth.
“I can’t stand being this far away from her,” I say. “If I come here without seeing her, I’m not crowding her. But if I can help out, be near this place, it still feels a little like being near her."
Lanie looks toward the road, then back at me. “That almost sounds like sense.”
“I have my moments.”
By dusk, the exposed section is dried in and weatherproofed. It isn’t finished, but the immediate danger is gone. Burt’s crew will be back in the morning. Jackson has a list of replacement materials, and Lanie has dates written on a notepad by the door, along with names and phone numbers.
I make sure Pritchett’s refund goes directly back into her account. I pay the emergency cost myself. When Lanie opens her mouth, I shake my head.
“No.”
“You don’t tell me no in my own yard.”
“I’m not letting you pay for this.”
“You got the money to pay him?”
She says nothing, and while I don’t want to be rude to her, I do want her to understand that this is as much necessity as it is my trying to help.
“Let me do this. You can hate me later.”
That earns a short, grudging breath from her.
Jackson is loading tools into the back of his truck when I walk over. “Thank you.”
He glances at the roof. “Any time. Wish she’d told us about it sooner.”
“She said she was a ‘stubborn old coot,’ so maybe that has something to do with it.”
Jackson laughs. “Yeah. That sounds like her.”
He doesn’t say anything more. Just gathers his things and backs out of the drive.
Behind me, Lanie steps onto the porch. “Annie’ll be back soon.”
The mental image hits me before I can stop it. Her pulling into the drive. Her coming up to me, wrapping her arms around me, and burying her head into my chest. I push the thought away.
“Guess I better be going then.”
Lanie frowns. “You’re leaving?”
“Yes.”
“You drove all this way.”
“She didn’t invite me.”
Lanie’s expression changes before she can hide it.
“I don’t want her coming home and thinking I used your roof to force an encounter,” I say.
“She might want to know what you did.”
“You can tell Annie whatever you want about the roof.” I look at the patched section, then at the buckets finally emptied by the door. “Just don’t make excuses for me.”
Lanie holds my gaze.
“She knows how to get in touch with me,” I add.
The words hurt more than my hands. I check once more that Burt has what he needs and that Lanie knows who will be here in the morning. Then I get into the rental car before I can convince myself to stay.
The drive back to the hotel is nothing but wet pavement and dark trees.
My hands throb on the steering wheel. Tar and damp dust cling to my clothes, sharp enough to cut through the heater’s stale air.
There’s dirt under my fingernails in black crescents, and no hotel sink is going to fix that tonight.
For the first time in a long while, I’ve spent a day doing something useful that Annie never asked for and might never even hear about. I pull into the hotel parking lot before she gets back to Lanie’s, making sure the only thing waiting for her is a patched roof and her aunt.
I don’t feel better, but then I didn’t really expect to.