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Tonight the bucket sound is gone.

"It's dry," he says. "Ninety percent of the north slope is on. I have eleven squares up and the ridge cap goes on Thursday."

"You're doing it alone?"

"Yes."

"Ghorlan."

"There is a ladder," he says, as though this addresses anything.

And then he stops, and the line is quiet, and nine days of a man building a roof over his grandmother while a woman four hundred miles away eats six meals a day and pays off a card room comes down to the sound of somebody at the other end of a phone in an empty hall, not hanging up.

"The kitchen has no wall on the west side," he says. "There is a ladder against the studs and a stack of shingle in the middle of the floor and it is not a room a person should be invited into."

"Uh huh."

"I am inviting you into it."

I am already standing up.

"Say the day," I say.

"Thursday."

I book nothing. I pack a duffel that same night, four days early, with four shirts and a tube of arnica and nine feet of alder curls on a length of paracord, and it sits by the door of a weekly rental like a dog with its leash in its mouth, and I step over it eleven times a day.

Thursday takes ninety years to arrive.

At six on Thursday morning I put a rental car on the interstate going north with the window down, and four hours in, past a town called Coldbrook, past a county bridge with a queen post truss that a man built eleven years ago for less money than he should have taken, I turn up a gravel drive toward a house with a bad roof.

CHAPTER 34

GHORLAN

DAY 34

Vessik leaves at nine in the morning with a bag she packed on Monday.

"Ruth's," she says.

"For how long."

"Three days." She puts her hat on at the mirror by the door and takes her time about it. "Ruth has a hip and a television and a great many opinions and I intend to survive all three."

"You have not been to Ruth's in two years."

"Then it's overdue."

She is four foot eleven and eighty-four years old and she has never once in my life been careful around me, and she does not start now. She gets to the door and stops with her hand on the frame.

"There's a chicken in the oven and a pie in the box and clean sheets on both beds," she says. "I want it noted that I have made up both beds."

"Gran."

"Noted," she says, and goes out to the car.

Junie Halloran comes up the drive at ten past eleven in a silver rental with one hubcap missing.