“There’s my superstar,” Dad said.
I went back up the ladder and worked until I could no longer trust my hands in the way you need to trust your hands on a steep pitch with a nail gun.
The third day I focused on the section above their bedroom. The most exposed part of the roof, the most likely to cause real damage if anything went wrong. My plan had been to finish that slope, secure the ridge cap, run a final inspection, and tarp the one remaining edge as a precaution.
But the heat had settled into my body in the way it does when you have been working in it for too many days consecutively, a kind of compound interest of physical depletion. And the humiliation kept replaying without my permission, the television, the group chat, the vacation printouts, my father calling me superstar while I bled through my gloves.
