I turned the slate over on the ridge of the roof in Dickson City, with the hot sun on my neck and half the street watching from the sidewalk, and held it to the light so that the second scratching showed. Under my own S.Z. 1981 were letters and figures in a nail scrawl. H OWES 8740. I knew the hand. It was the loop of the 8 that Dolores made, the little tail on the 7 she learned from the nuns. I had to put the slate down on the copper and wipe my eyes with my wrist.
“Pop,” Greg said, still straddling the ridge, “the doctor told me the whole story an hour ago. In 1981 his father hired you to put new slate on that house, and when the job was done he stiffed you for the last of it. Eighty seven hundred forty dollars. You came home and told Mom to let it go, because the old doctor was a big man in the church. She said she would. And that night, while you slept, she climbed the ladder with a nail and scratched the number on the back of a slate where nobody would see it.”
I could not speak. I saw her so plainly, a young woman of thirty, in her housecoat, with her hair in a scarf, going up a ladder in the dark with a nail in her fist, because her husband would not fight and she could not bear it. Fifty years she had never said one word. I opened the envelope with my pocketknife. It was a letter from the lawyer of Dr. Preston Hale, dated last winter, addressed to my wife. Dr. Hale, it said, having learned of an old matter concerning the 1981 roof of his father, wished to resolve it privately.
Clipped to the letter was a check, never cashed, for eighty seven hundred forty dollars, made out to Dolores Zielinski. On the back, in her careful Catholic school hand, she had written two lines in pencil. No. Tell Stan. She had meant to tell me at supper, I thought, and then she had got sick, and it had slid off the table of our lives with all the other things we meant to say. I sat there on the ridge with the check in my hand and the August sun in my face and wept like an old fool, and my son held on to my belt.
Some bills are only paid when a family stops being afraid to read the old ledger.
Greg said he was sorry. He said it three times, in three different ways. He said he had yelled at his father for sending a bill, when his mother had been trying to send it for forty years. I told him there was nothing to forgive. I told him that a boy who climbs a ladder at fifty with his arms full of shame has already done the work of an honest man. He laughed through his tears. Down on the sidewalk, the neighbors applauded, though I think they had not heard a word of it.
We rode up to the big stone house on the hill together that afternoon, in the truck of Greg, with the slate wrapped in a towel on my lap. Dr. Hale met us at the door in a gray cardigan. He was an old man himself now, thinner than I remembered, with the bluish hands of a man who has not slept. Melissa stood behind him on the stairs with her arms folded across her chest. I held out the slate. He took it. He turned it over and read the figure, and his knees seemed to fold a little, and he put a hand against the door frame.
“My father cheated you,” he said, “and I did not learn of it until I went through his papers last winter. I tried to buy your wife silence, God forgive me, because I was afraid of what Melissa would think. Then she died, and I thought it was over. Then you sent me a bill for exactly the same sum, and I thought God Himself was laughing.” He went to his desk and wrote a check without sitting down. Seventeen thousand four hundred eighty dollars. The old and the new. And a third paper, an apology, in a firm, shaky hand.
Melissa came down the stairs. She was crying openly, the way her father never had. She said that she had been ashamed of me for the lumberyard and the courthouse and the whole of it, and that she was ashamed now of being ashamed. I told her that shame was a fine thing to feel, so long as one did not stay there. I said that a woman who had grown up in a stone house on a hill was entitled to a few blind spots. She laughed, and hugged me, and smelled of lavender and fresh bread.
On Monday I withdrew the complaint at the office of the district judge, and the girl at the window refunded my filing fee without being asked. Then I climbed the roof of the Hale house myself, with Tony holding the ladder, and found the leak under the third course by the dormer. Copper flashing, copper nails. Matched slate from the old stock in my shed. It took two days, and I charged nothing. When I came down, Dr. Hale handed me a glass of lemonade and sat on the step beside me, and we watched the clouds roll over the valley in silence.
Thanksgiving was at my house. Greg and Melissa came with the children, and even the doctor came, in a tie, with a pie from the bakery, and ate three helpings of pierogi. The family sat at the long table in the kitchen with the green ledger in the middle, open to the page for 1981. Nobody spoke of money. Melissa read aloud, from the back of an envelope, a short grace that she had written herself. When she was done, my grandson, six years old, asked in a loud voice whether the grace was about the roof.
The slate hangs now over the kitchen table, in a plain pine frame, with the two sets of letters plainly visible. Beneath it lies the green ledger and the folded glasses of Dolores. On Sundays at the church, I sit in the third pew and look up at the steeple that Tony and I set right, with its new copper cross shining over the town. I like to think she can see it. I look at it every week and say what I never told her. You were right, Dolores. You were always right. Thank you for the nail.
