“Young lady, you let me worry about the numbers.”

That is the part I keep coming back to. Not the price. The pat. He reached across my own kitchen table and patted the back of my hand like I was a child who had wandered into the grown-up conversation.

His name was Dale. Big handshake, big truck, one of those clipboards with the metal flap that snaps. He told me the roof would run twenty-eight thousand four hundred, and that grief makes these things confusing, so he would just handle everything for me. And I sat there in my own chair, in the house Raymond and I bought in 1981, and I let him.

Raymond passed in the spring. April. I am not going to make this whole thing about that because I will start crying and I want to tell it straight. But I think you have to know that part to understand the rest. When you lose the person you argued with about thermostat settings for forty years, the house gets very loud and very quiet at the same time. People start treating you like glass. And some people, I learned, see that glass and decide it’s a window they can climb through.

So Dale talked. I poured his coffee. I want to be honest with you, I played a little dumb. I worried my head, like he told me to. I nodded and said oh my and let him explain to me, slowly, what a square of shingles was. He drew me a little diagram. He underlined the total twice and turned the clipboard around so I could see it, the way you turn a menu toward a kid who can’t read the prices yet. And the whole time I was nodding, I was doing something he could not see. I was adding.

Here is the thing Dale did not bother to ask me. Before I retired, I spent thirty-five years writing construction estimates for one of the biggest builders in this county. Thirty-five years. I priced jobs that put up half the strip malls on Route 9. I knew the supply houses by their first names. I knew what a square of architectural shingle cost wholesale, I knew the labor per square, I knew tear-off, I knew dumpster rental, I knew the dance every contractor does with the markup. Men like Dale used to bring me their numbers and I would hand them back bleeding red ink. I did not tell him any of this. I just poured more coffee.