He gave her a last good look at the pen and resumed his writing.

Angela drank from her bottle. The rain fell steadily on the parked cars. Women in sneakers made a run for it, water spinning from the cart wheels.

“Do you mind if I ask what you’re writing with such a pen?”

The old man hesitated. He didn’t look up.

“I’m writing notes. For my grandson.”

“Where does he live?”

“He doesn’t. He’s dead.”

“Oh. I’m sorry . . .”

“He died serving this country.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well,” said the old man.

Angela was silent. Then she said again that she was sorry, and the old man scratched at the tip of his nose. He stirred a finger in the white hair of his ear. “I figure I’ll go on writing him like before. He’s got a wife and a little boy and I figure that’s why I’m still here, so I can tell him how they’re doing. I know how crazy that sounds.”

Angela shook her head. “No,” she said.

He wrote for a while and then he put down the pen and took his writing hand in the other and rubbed at the knuckles. He looked over his shoulder at the rain as though it had been hounding him all his life. He said: “An old aunt of mine told me one time, Simon, if you knew what growin’ old was you wouldn’t be in no rush to get there. I didn’t know what to make of that at the time.”

She waited. “And now?”

“How’s that?”

“What about now?”

“Now?” He looked at her, somehow keenly for all his eye trouble. “Now I wonder why a man lives so long he doesn’t even know the world he’s in anymore.”

“Granddad?”

A woman came up behind him, a little boy in tow. Same woman, same little boy. The woman didn’t seem to believe what she was seeing.

Angela smiled at the old man. “Thank you for letting me sit with you.”

The old man touched the tweed cap and got slowly to his feet. The little boy handed him his cane. “The pleasure was mine, young lady.”

7

At midmorning Grant helped the old Labrador into the cab, then drove the three miles through the foothills to the cafe for his coffee and eggs and the Denver paper. Other such Saturdays, when he would return to the truck an hour, sometimes two hours later, the dog would be asleep on the bench seat, having been asleep the entire time, but on this morning, when

he returned after only thirty minutes, the dog lifted her head and watched him glassily, as if puzzled in her dog brain to see him back so soon. He got in and said nothing, and did not scratch her ears, nor turn on the radio, and as he drove back through the hills she cast baleful looks at him until at last without looking he said, “She wasn’t there. So what?”

By the time he pulled into the long gravel drive he’d not been gone an hour, but it was the hour in which the black car returned.

Billy.

He brought the truck to a stop and sat staring at the car across the front pasture. Bright, glossy black and parked at a careless angle next to the old man’s blue Ford at the side of the house. The two bay mares grazed the fence line near the county road, as far from the house and the black car as they could be. The dog sat watching him, quietly panting.

“Not a thing to do about it,” he said finally, and drove on toward the house. He parked beside the El Camino and stepped out of the truck and the dog spilled out behind him and limped around the corner of the house and disappeared.

He lit a cigarette.

Heat rose from the black hood. In the cab a litter of coffee cups and burger bags and crushed Marlboro packs. In the bed nothing but a flat tire and a tire iron, flung there, from the look of them, in a moment of disgust.

Grant walked around the side of the house and onto the dirt cul-de-sac with its grassy island and the blue spruce at its center, and as he came around the spruce he saw the aluminum ladder leaning against the eaves of the old ranch house, the old man up on the pitched tin roof in a blaze of reflected sunlight, on his knees, clinging one-handed to the brick

chimney.

“Shit,” Grant said. He stepped on his cigarette and went to the foot of the ladder. “I see you couldn’t wait for me.”

Emmet shifted for a look down, his lenses flaring. “—How’s that?”

“I said I see you couldn’t wait for me.”

The old man turned back to his work. “Did wait, by God. Waited all morning while this roof got preheated.”

“I’m coming up now.”

“Bring some Crisco with you.”

“Some what?”

“Crisco. You can’t fry your ass without Crisco.” He frowned under the brim of his straw cowboy hat. You could make him smile with a joke, but when he made one himself he frowned. Beneath his coveralls he wore only a sleeveless undershirt, baring the white knobs of his shoulders to the sun. His red windbreaker lay on the ground below like a fallen helper.

Grant climbed the ladder and stood watching the old man scour the base of the chimney with a wire brush. “You might’ve got your boy to spot you on the ladder at least,” he said, and Emmet glanced across the sky to the other house, then resumed his work.

“He come in a little after you left and went straight to his room. Walked right by me like a ghost.” The back of the old man’s neck was a dark leather chamois, red in its seams. Thick smile of scar running under the jaw where part of the throat had been removed, the scar a bright crimson in the sun. Grant thought to say something more about Emmet’s son but then remembered his own son, gone one morning without good-bye, without even a note. Half a year ago now. More. Taking Grant’s blue Chevy for good measure. Could’ve called the cops. Still could.

“You think that’s clean enough for fresh jack?” Emmet leaned away from the chimney and Grant looked for the place to grab him if he slipped.

“I think that’ll do.” A five-gallon bucket hung from the top of the ladder and inside was a bristle brush, a small spade trowel, and two fresh tubes of roofing cement. When Emmet was finished with the bristle brush, he took the caulking gun from Grant and began to squeeze the black cement into the deep crack where the flashing had split and pulled away from the brick.

“She’s thirsty up here,” said Emmet.

“Is she?”

“Like a tick on a tumbleweed.” He emptied both tubes and took the little spade trowel and began to work the cement like black icing. After a while he wiped his brow with his forearm and said: “How’s that look to you, contractor man?”

“Like I did it myself. Better.”

“Like hell. You’d of tore out half this roof and put new flashing on.”

“This will do for now.”

“That’s all I’m asking. The next man after me can do it his way.”

Back on the ground Grant stowed the ladder and they went up on the porch for the shade and looked out at the sky as if to watch for the storm that would now come along and test their work. But the sky was clear and the old man’s joints told him there’d be no rain today nor any day soon. The dog lay under the porch in the dark with her chin on her paws, listening.

“Come up to the house for lunch,” Emmet said. “I got coldcuts, and we could fry us some bacon, and not that goddam fake bacon neither.”

Emmet’s house sat stark and handsome in the sun. From the outside it appeared to be a large two-story log cabin cut from the very pines that marched down the hills to surround the ranch’s meadows and pastures, when in fact it had arrived in sections on the back of an eighteen-wheeler ten years before, and the men who brought it had put it together in two days and the walls inside were as smooth and white as any art gallery’s. Emmet had done it for Alice, his wife, but she got to enjoy the house for less than a year before she died, all of a sudden in the night, from a clot in her brain. Guess what you can count on, said the old man: nothing.