Outstanding

Travis Kell hit the chain-link fence at a run, grabbed the top rail, and threw himself over. Reid Maddox went over a step behind him, landed harder than he wanted to, and felt it in both knees. Kell had six yards on him and was spending them fast. The backyard was a wreck from the hail: two trees stripped bare, a plastic shed beaten to pieces, a trampoline folded against the back fence with one leg sticking up through the torn mat. Kell looked over his shoulder, missed the leg, and went down hard in a bed of wet mulch. Reid was on him before he got his feet under him.

"Stay down," Reid said. "You're already tired. I'm not."

Kell threw an elbow backward. Reid caught the arm, turned it up behind his back, and put a knee between his shoulder blades until the fight went out of him. The cuffs came off Reid's belt and closed on Kell's wrists. The pistol on Reid's hip stayed in its holster.

"You didn't have to run," Reid said.

Kell spat mulch. "Felt like I did."

"Everybody feels fast for about forty yards."

Four minutes, counting the fence. Reid hauled him upright and checked the cuffs, and under the small satisfaction of a clean pickup sat the old irritation. Kell was younger by a decade and had managed one fence and half a yard. A man ought to have to work a little for his money, even money this small.

They came out through a side gate onto a street of blue tarps and sagging gutters, a chalk X on half the roofs where somebody had come through after the storm and marked them. Two weeks since the hail, and the west side still looked as if it had happened that morning. Reid folded the seat forward in his old red-and-white Ford Bronco, put Kell in the back, and listened to the water pump whine when he started it.

"Comfortable?" he asked.

"No."

"Good. Means you can feel your hands."

Lyle had offered him a second man that morning. Reid had turned him down, the way he always did. A second man meant splitting the fee and spending half the morning arguing over who took which door, and one man who knew his business was generally enough.

Lyle Brandt's bail-bond storefront smelled of old coffee and the space heater he ran under the desk even in May, because his knees didn't care what the calendar said. He looked at the mulch on Kell's shirt and the scrape on his cheek and decided neither one needed paperwork.

"Told you Dale was sitting in the lot," Lyle said.

"Didn't need him."

"You never need him. One day you will, and he'll be eating a sandwich somewhere."

Lyle took Kell through the back and came out counting four hundred dollars from a desk drawer. Reid folded the bills into his jacket without counting them again. Lyle had shorted him once, years ago, and had gone red across his bald head and dug through his own pockets to make it right, and Reid had decided then that he was careless rather than crooked.

"Pump still groaning?" Lyle asked.

"Still turning."

"That's not what I asked."

"That's the answer I've got."

Rent was due Friday, and the water pump would not last much longer. Four hundred dollars would cover one or the other if he was careful. It wouldn't cover both.

His mother's house was across the metro, on the way home if he drove it right, and he always drove it right. Her street had taken the hail as badly as the west side: tarps on both sides, dumpsters at the ends of driveways, a crew two houses down stripping shingles into a trailer. Donna's house had a chalk X too, white on the dark shingles near the chimney, faded by two weeks of weather and nothing else. The gutter under it sagged. There were no bundles of shingles in the yard, no ladder marks in the flowerbed, no grit kicked into the gutters. Nobody had touched that roof.

Donna opened the door before he knocked, a dish towel over one shoulder.

"You're not due till supper," she said.

"Saw your roof."

"It's still there. Mostly."

From the kitchen came a steady drip, water striking something hollow. A plastic bucket sat in the middle of the kitchen floor on a folded towel, catching water from a brown stain that had spread across the ceiling. It was a third full.

"How long?" Reid asked.

"Since Thursday."

"That's five days."

"I know how to count days, Reid. I did it for a living."

"Why didn't you call me?"

"Because you'd come over and stand in my kitchen looking at the ceiling." She watched him do exactly that. "Like that."

He moved the bucket an inch to center it under the drip. Donna kept one hand on the counter.

"They're coming Monday," she said.

"Who is?"

"The roofing crew. Summit. They marked the house after the storm."

"You said Monday last time I asked."

"There was a delay with materials. Everybody in town needs a roof." She moved a dish from the counter to the rack, though it was already dry. He had watched her keep her hands busy through hard conversations his whole life.

"You paid them," he said.

"I paid a deposit. Everyone pays a deposit."

"How much?"

"The paperwork's in the drawer."

He found the folder in the drawer by the phone, under a church bulletin and a rubber-banded stack of coupons. The contract was two pages, printed a little crooked, with SUMMIT STORM REPAIR across the top and a roof-shaped logo that looked borrowed from somebody else's truck. Crew lead: Cody, in blue ink. A phone number beside the name. An office address along the bottom. Donna's signature sat exactly on its line, in the careful hand he had known before he knew his own.

He dialed the number. Two rings, three tones, and a recording that told him the number was no longer in service. He checked the digits against the page, dialed again, and got the same woman saying the same thing.

Reid set the receiver back in the cradle and kept his hand on it. "Disconnected," he said, and waited until Donna looked away.

"Maybe they changed it."

"They printed this one on your contract."

"That doesn't mean they couldn't change it."

"No. It doesn't."

Donna took the folder back from him and set it on the counter instead of in the drawer. "You're not going over there to start a fight."

"With a roofer?"

"With anybody."

The address led to a strip center off the state highway, a dollar store at one end and a row of smaller units running down from it. The unit on the contract had brown paper taped inside the glass and a FOR LEASE sign leaning against the door with a film of dust on it. Reid cupped a hand to the window and saw a bare floor, a few zip ties, and a folding chair on its side. He tried the door, and it was locked.

The nail salon next door had its lights on. A woman at the front table looked up with an emery board in her hand and was already shaking her head when he opened the door.

"You're the ninth one this week," she said. "Most of them are old."

"Looking for Summit?"

"Looking at that window like it's going to answer." She pointed next door with the emery board. "They were in there maybe six weeks. Folding table, laptop, a banner taped in the glass. Young guys in polo shirts carrying papers. Then one morning the banner's gone and the chair's on its side."

"See them move anything out?"

"Nobody moved anything. They stopped coming." She set the emery board down on the table and leaned back, folding her hands over her apron until the vinyl of her stool creaked. "The old ones come over here after, because they don't know where else to stand. They ask me if I saw a moving truck. I tell them the glass doesn't talk either way."

"Anybody leave a forwarding address?"

"Not with me. If you find them, tell them to take my address off their paperwork. I'm tired of sending people home."

Reid thanked her and stood in the lot a while, looking at the dead storefront and doing math he didn't have the numbers for yet.

That night Donna reheated the pot roast and set two plates at the kitchen table, under the stain, which had grown since afternoon. Neither of them mentioned it. The bucket was back in place, emptied and ready, and the drip had slowed to an occasional tap. She held her coffee cup in both hands and looked at a spot past his shoulder.

"He knocked on the door the week after the storm," she said. "Polite. Company name on his shirt. Called me ma'am. Said they were checking roofs on the street and could look before it got worse."

"You didn't call them."

"I didn't know I was supposed to call anybody. Your father always handled the roof." She lifted her chin a little. "I've handled it six years without him, and I can read a contract, so don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you're deciding whether I need looking after."

He kept his hands flat on the table and let her go on.

"He walked the roof with me. Pointed at things. I don't know a hail bruise from a nail pop, and I never claimed to. He said the price would go up if I waited, with every house in the metro needing materials, and the deposit locked it in." She turned the cup a quarter turn. "I asked if they were insured. I asked how long it would take. He had an answer for everything, and he was very easy to talk to. He asked about your father. I don't know how he knew to ask."

"He didn't know. He just asked."

"Well, it worked." She said it the way she would mark a wrong answer on her own test. "I read every line before I signed it."

"I know you did. I saw the signature."

"Then you know."

"Did he come back?"

"He called. A delay, then another one, then Monday." She looked at the bucket. "He said they'd take care of it."

She told it straight and in order, the way she used to read attendance numbers into the office phone, and somewhere in the order there was a step she had folded smaller and put away. Reid didn't know what it was. He had sat across this table from her for forty years, and he knew when a story had a fold in it.

"How much was the deposit?" he asked.

"I saved for that roof. Your father and I always kept money back for the house, and after he died I kept doing it." Her mouth set. "Twenty-six thousand four hundred dollars."

She said it the way a school secretary reads back a figure she has checked twice, clean and exact. Reid started to answer her and stopped.

A page had opened behind his eyes. The kitchen was still there, Donna across the table, the refrigerator humming, a drop landing in the bucket, but behind all of it, plain as a sheet of paper held up to his face, hung a ledger page ruled in thin black lines. One line was filled in. He knew the handwriting before he could read the words, the slanted capitals and the hooked tail on the fours, because it was his own, and he had never written it.

He blinked, and the page stayed. He looked at the stain on the ceiling and at his mother's hands around her cup, and it stayed behind those too, steady as a printed form. Donna said something more about the roof and saw nothing change in his face. Reid read the line the way he had read a thousand warrants, name first, then the amount.

[CLAIM OPENED - Donna Maddox - $26,400.00 - OUTSTANDING]