Original fiction · Chapter 1 of 2
The Roof We Never Replaced
The invoice my brother wanted me to sign listed a full roof replacement. The homeowner was standing ten feet away, under the same brown stain I’d measured six weeks earlier.
Mrs. Ellis had called us out after the hailstorm. She’d lost three shingles by the vent and a strip of flashing along the back. I remembered because she held the ladder while I took pictures, and when I came down she made me take a slice of lemon cake wrapped in a coffee filter.
Now our company logo was at the top of a $17,840 bill, and the line marked “Completed by” had my name on it.
“What did you tell her?” I asked.
Paul, my younger brother, closed the folder. “That we were sorting out the paperwork for her home insurance claim.”
“You told her the job was done.”
“She already signed the estimate.”
“She signed an estimate to see what it might cost. She called me the next day and asked for a repair instead.”
Mrs. Ellis knocked on the little square of glass in the office door. “I can come back,” she said.
I asked her to sit down. Paul went out for coffee none of us had ordered.
She handed me a printed email from her insurance adjuster. It mentioned photos of the finished work and a date when the crew supposedly removed the old shingles. She’d been home that day waiting for a pharmacy delivery. She remembered because the courier rang the bell twice and left the package on the wrong porch. Nobody had brought a dumpster or a ladder.
The roofing company had been Dad’s first. He left it to us in equal shares, which sounded fair until I realized one of us would always have to be on a roof while the other sat near the bank statements. Paul was good with customers. When Dad was sick, he could talk to him for an hour about the weather without either of them feeling they’d wasted their time. I kept remembering that as I called the adjuster with Mrs. Ellis beside me.
He sent me the photos she’d been shown. The house was her color, and the vent sat in roughly the right place. But the roof in the close-up had black metal edging. Mrs. Ellis’s was white. I knew that black edging. I’d cut it myself for a job on Briar Lane.
The paperwork claimed I’d inspected the site in person on a Tuesday. That Tuesday I’d driven my son to a dental appointment across town and held a cup of melting ice to his cheek the whole way home.
At closing time, Jordan, our youngest crew member, came in for the gloves he’d left drying on the radiator. I showed him the picture. He asked if I could turn the office light on.
“That’s Briar Lane,” he said. “Paul had me text him the photos. Said the homeowner wanted copies.”
I asked if Paul had done that before.
Jordan turned the invoice over and pointed to a reference number in the corner. “We started tracking jobs in a spreadsheet last winter. Those numbers were sequential until March.” He took out his phone and found the copy he kept for his hours.
Mrs. Ellis’s job was the latest entry. Above hers, eleven rows had the same kind of missing date.
Jordan looked up. “You remember the check Dad’s friend sent us to fix the roof over the food pantry?”
I remembered patching the leak myself for nothing.
“That’s the first one,” he said.
