After he left I sat at that table for a long time. Then I got up and got out my reading glasses and a legal pad, the yellow kind, and I went to work the way I had not in five years.

I measured off the roof from the survey we had in the file cabinet. Raymond kept everything. God, he kept everything, and that used to drive me crazy, and now it was saving me. I priced the shingles by the square that same evening. I called both supply houses the next morning, said I was pricing materials for a property, and I got the real numbers. Not Dale numbers. Real ones.

The honest figure, with a fair labor rate and a fair profit built in, came to a little under nineteen thousand. He had padded it by nearly ten. Forty percent. I sat there looking at my own handwriting and I was not sad anymore. I want to be clear about that. The crying widow took her glasses off and the woman who used to make grown men sweat in conference rooms put them back on.

But I didn’t stop at the math. That’s not how you do it. I called his two references, the ones he wrote on the back of his card like they were trophies. The first woman, Carol, was lovely and a little too quick to say everything was fine, fine, everything was just fine, in that voice people use when it was not fine. The second one talked for twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes. She told me about the leak that came back. She told me about the change orders that appeared out of nowhere. She told me he called her “sweetheart” and her late husband’s name was on the deed and Dale assumed there was no one left who knew anything. I just listened and said mm-hmm and wrote it all down.

And then I did the thing I am actually proud of. I called Frank. Frank did roofs for one of our subs back in the day and Frank is honest to a fault, the kind of man who will call you back to lower a bill because the job went faster than he quoted. I hadn’t talked to him in years. He came out that Thursday, walked the roof himself, and gave me a number on a single sheet of paper. Nineteen-two. No pat on the hand. He shook my hand the same way he’d shake anybody’s. I told him to start the following week. So by the time Tuesday came around, the job was already spoken for. Dale just didn’t know it yet.