Kathleen Gunderson now directed the clinic; she’d been a nurse for twenty-five years. They’d seen each other two or three times in the thirty years since the spring of graduation. “Are you having a small moment of déjà vu?” Mason asked.
“I don’t think I held your injured hand at any time,” she said.
“Must be the pain,” he said. “I haven’t had an injury for twenty years. I’m reassessing what I’ve been doing with my hands. I type. I unfold napkins.”
“You do good work in the big city,” she said. “And you talk the same bullshit you did in high school.”
“Not exactly the same,” he said.
“No stitches,” she said.
“I’m going to fix that house up. I’m on vacation or something.”
“I’ll see you around, Mason. Be careful with your project. You look well,” she said.
“I’m holding up. You look the very same.”
“Did you see Frank?”
“I haven’t, but I heard. Are you okay?”
“We’ve been coming apart for a long while. Everybody’s okay.”
“And business is booming,” he said, nodding back at the waiting room.
She walked him to the glass doors and out into the angled sunlight. “We used to have a lot of drug-related work accidents,” she told him. “Now it’s more just drugs, sometimes a car.”
“I’m here for a month.”
“We’ll get a coffee,” she said.
“Maybe dinner with Marci and Craig. I’ve been staying there.”
“Keep your hand dry,” she said. “We’ll see you.”
• • •
Up on the roof at the center of the day, Mason said to Craig, “I’ve never been up here. I lived in the place seventeen years, and I was never on the roof. I was on the garage, and I was on top of Jimmy’s house once, getting a football out of the rain gutter, and the two shoes we’d thrown at it, but this is a first, this week.” They had laid three overlapping sheets of tarred roofing paper and had three to go, working their way up the planking. They wanted the paper down by nightfall; there was no more rain on the way, but still. Mason had hired a roofer for the green asphalt shingles, which stood on pallets in the side yard right now. Mason’s shirt was soaked through and flecked with tar paper lint. He hadn’t sweated through a shirt for twenty years, and it felt good. Tomorrow he and Craig would be downstairs working inside.
“When was it that Mr. Starkey fell off his roof?”
“Oh my god,” Mason said. He ran his packing knife through the black paper and stapled both corners. “Mr. Starkey.” He sat down next to Craig for a minute and pointed. “Where’d they live?”
“Behind the Millards.” Craig raised his hand, wandering over the houses an alley away. “There, the blue one with the carport. It used to be green, but they sided it.”
“I was in tenth grade,” Mason said. “Virginia Starkey was in my class.”
“She was a beauty.”
“She was,” Mason said. He was grinning, about to laugh, and he put his hand on Craig’s shoulder. “And what was it? The old man was on the roof? Oh god, I’d forgotten this whole story. It’s in one of Jimmy’s books.”