They went to the roofer’s house, not his shop, because Bertram knew someone who knew the address, which is how things work in Youngstown when someone needs to know something quickly.
I want to be honest about what happened and what did not. Nobody broke anyone’s arm. That detail is the version the story grew into as it traveled, and I understand why, because people wanted a satisfying conclusion to a satisfying outrage. What actually happened was thirty motorcycles parked outside a man’s house on a Tuesday evening, and thirty men sat on those motorcycles without moving or saying much, and the roofer came to his window and looked out, and thirty men looked back.
Bertram knocked on the door. The roofer opened it. Bertram said, in the specific and unhurried way that Bertram communicates, that an eighty-six-year-old widower was waiting on a roof job, and that the materials had been on his lawn for six weeks, and that the people currently parked outside would be interested to hear what the roofer’s plan was for making it right.
The roofer called his crew.
They showed up the following morning and finished the roof in two days. The work was inspected by a licensed contractor my sister found, and it passed. The roofer also returned eleven thousand of the seventeen thousand four hundred, which was everything he had available, and signed a payment agreement for the rest that my dad’s lawyer drew up for two hundred dollars.
My dad watched the motorcycles come back down his road that evening from his front window, the same window where he had been watching for the roofer for six weeks. He was still in his slippers. When Bertram came to the door, my dad shook his hand for a long time without speaking. Then he said, “I was in the Marines. I never needed anybody to fight for me before.” Bertram said, “You still didn’t. We just parked.” My dad laughed, which was the first time I had heard him laugh since I found those shingles in the yard.
The roofer is still out there operating. I reported him formally, again, with the payment agreement as evidence, and this time the state contractor board opened an investigation. Whether anything comes of it I do not know yet.
My dad’s roof is solid. He will make it through the winter. He threw away the moldy shingles himself, which took him most of an afternoon, and he did not ask for help, which tells you everything about him that I have been trying to say.
