Winterize lawn
The list went on from there for the entire page and half of the back. Joe knew if he worked the entire day and into the night he wouldn't complete the list, even if Sheridan was helping him, which she wasn't. Plus, experience told him there would be a snag of some kind that would derail him and frustrate his progress, something simple but unanticipated. The gutter would detach from the house while he scraped the leaves out of it, or the lumber store wouldn't have the right fence slats and they'd need to order them. Something. Like when the tree branches started to shiver and shake as a gust of wind from the north rolled through them with just enough muscle to catch the ladder and send it clattering straight backward from the house to the lawn as if it had been shot. And there he was, stranded on the top of the roof of a house he really didn't even want to live in, much less own.
The wind went away just as suddenly as it had appeared.
"Sheridan?"
No response. She was very likely back in bed.
"Sheridan? Lucy? Marybeth?" He paused, "Anybody?"
He thought of stomping on the roof with his boots or danglinga HELP! message over the eave so Marybeth might see it out the kitchen window. Jumping from the roof to the cotton-woodtree in the front yard was a possibility, but the distance was daunting and he visualized missing the branch and thumping into the trunk and tumbling to the ground. Or, he thought sourly, he could just sit up there until the winter snows came and his body was eaten by ravens.
Instead, he went to work. He had a hammer and a pocketful of nails in the front of his hooded sweatshirt. And a spatula.
As he secured the loose shingles he could see his next-door neighbor, Ed Nedny, come out of his front door and stand on his porch looking pensive. Nedny was a retired town administrator who now spent his time working on his immaculate lawn, tendinghis large and productive garden, keeping up his perfectly well-appointed home, and washing, waxing, and servicing his three vehicles-a vintage Chevy pickup, a Jeep Cherokee, and the black Lincoln Town Car that rarely ventured out of the garage. Joe had seen Nedny the night before when he came home applying Armor All to the whitewall tires of the Town Car under a trouble light. Although his neighbor didn't stare outrightat Joe, he was there to observe. To comment. To offer neighborly advice. Nedny wore a watch cap and heavy sweater, and drew serenely on his pipe, letting a fragrant cloud of the smoke waft upward toward Joe on the roof as if he sent it there.
Joe tapped a nail into a shingle to set it, then drove it home with two hard blows.
"Hey, Joe," Ed called.
"Ed."
"Fixing your roof?"
Joe passed a beat, discarded a sarcastic answer, and said. "Yup."
Which gave Ed pause as well, and made him look down at his feet for a few long, contemplative moments. Ed, Joe had discerned,liked to be observed while contemplating. Joe didn't comply.
"You know," Ed said, finally, "a fellow can't actually fix T-Lock shingles. It's like trying to fix a car radio without taking it out of the dash. It just can't be done properly."
Joe took in a deep and waited. He dug another nail out of the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt.
"Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't try or that you're washingyour time. I'm not saying that at all," Ed said, chuckling in the way a master chuckles at a hapless apprentice, Joe thought. The way his mentor-gone-bad Vern Dunnegan used to chuckle at him.
"Then what are you saying?" Joe asked.
"It's just that you can't really fix shingles in a little patch and expect them to hold," Ed said. "The shingles overlap like this," he held his hands out and placed one on top of another. "You can't fix a shingle properly without taking the top one off first. And because they overlap, you need to take the one off that. What I'm saying, Joe, is that with T-Lock shingles you've got to lay a whole new set of shingles on top or strip the whole roof and start over so they seat properly. You can't just fix a section. You've got to fix it all. If I was you, I'd call your insurance man and have him come out and look at it. That way, you can get got a whole new roof."
"What if I don't want a whole new roof?" Joe asked.
Ed shrugged affably, "That's your call, of course. It's your roof. I'm not trying to make you do anything. But if you look at the other roofs on the block-at my roof-you'll see we have a certain standard. None of us have patches where you can see a bunch of nail heads. Plus, it might leak. Then you've got ceiling damage. You don't want that, do you?"
"No," Joe said defensively.
"Nobody wants that," Ed said, nothing, puffing. Then lookingup at Joe and squinting through a cloud of smoke, "Are you aware your ladder fell down?"
"Yup," Joe answered quickly.
"Do you want me to prop the ladder back up so you can come down?"
"That's not necessary," Joe said, "I need to clean the gutters first."
"I was wondering when you were going to get to that," Ed said.
Joe grunted.
"Are you going to get started on your fence then too?"
"Ed…"
"Just trying to help," Ed said, waving his pipe, "just being neighborly."
Joe said nothing.
"It isn't like where you used to live," Ed continued on, "up the Bighorn Road or out there on your mother-in-law's ranch. In town, we all look out for each other and help each other out."
"Got it," Joe said, feeling his neck flush hot, wishing Ed Nedney would turn his attention to someone else on the street or go wax his car or go to breakfast with his old retired buddies at the Burg-O-Pardner downtown.
Joe kept his head down, and started scraping several inches of dead leaves from his gutter with the spatula he'd borrowed from the kitchen drawer.
"I've got a tool for that," Ed offered.
"That's okay, Ed," Joe said through clenched teeth, "I'm doingjust fine."
"Mind if I come over?" Nedney asked while crossing his lawn onto Joe's. It was easy to see the property line, Joe noted, since Ed's lawn was green and raked clean of leaves and Joe's was neither. Nedny grumbled about the shape of Joe's old ladderwhile raising it and propping it up against the eave. "Is this ladder going to collapse on me?" Ed asked while he climbed it.
"We'll see," Joe said, as Nedny's big, fleshy face and pipe appeared just above the rim of the gutter. Ed rose another rung so he could fold his arms on the roof and watch Joe more comfortably.He was close enough that Joe could have reached out and patted the top of Nedny's watch cap with the spatula.
"Ah, the joys of being a homeowner, eh?" Ed said.
Joe nodded.
"Is it true this is the first house you've owned?"
"Yes."
"You've got a lovely family. Two daughters, right? Sheridan and Lucy?"
"Yes."
"I met your wife Marybeth a couple of weeks ago. She owns that business management company-MBP? I've heard good things about them."
"Good."
"She's quite a lovely woman as well. I've met her mother, Missy. The apple didn't fall far from that tree."
"Yes it did," Joe said, wishing the ladder would collapse.
"I heard you used to live out on the ranch with her and Bud Longbrake. Why did you decide to move to town? That's a pretty nice place out there."
"Nosy neighbors," Joe said.
Nedny forged on, "What are you? Forty?"
"Almost."
"So you've always lived in state-owned houses, huh? Paid for by the state?"
Joe sighed and looked up. "I'm a game warden, Ed. The game and fish department provided housing."
"I remember you used to live out on the Bighorn Road," Nedny said. "Nice little place, if I remember. Phil Kiner lives there now. Since he's the new game warden for the county, what do you do?"
Joe wondered how long Nedny had been waiting to ask these questions since they'd bought the home and moved in. Probably from the first day. But until now, Nedny hadn't had the opportunityto corner Joe and ask.
"I still work for the department," Joe said. "I fill in wherever they need me."
"I heard," Nedny said, raising his eyebrows man-to-man, "that you work directly for the governor now. Like you're some kind of special agent or something."