Loretta did not hurry. She had never once hurried on a roof, and she was not going to start because a young man was holding her ladder.
She put the chip of concrete in her coat pocket. She came down the slope of the porch roof on her heels, turned, and set her foot on the top rung. Three points of contact. One rung at a time.
Brody held the ladder steady the whole way down. She gave him that much. When she reached the ground, he let go and stepped back with his smile on.
"Well?" he said. "You saw the crack."
"I saw it."
"Then you know." He picked up the clipboard. "Forty-two hundred today, and we're out here Monday."
Walt's truck pulled up behind Brody's. Walt got out slowly, looked at the ladder, looked at Loretta, and leaned against his fender without a word.
"Show me that picture again," Loretta said.
Brody held out the tablet. Loretta took it and walked around the side of the house to where the chimney ran up the outside wall, brick by brick, from the ground to the eaves.
"Come here a minute, son," she said. "Count with me."
He came, because he did not know what else to do.
Loretta laid her hand flat on her chimney. "Five rows of brick laid long side out. Then one row turned endways, so all you see is the short ends. Then five long rows again. Then another row of ends. That's called common bond. The ends tie the wall together. My chimney is laid like that from the ground to the top. So are most of the brick houses on this street that went up before the war."
She held up the tablet next to the wall.
"Your picture is all long sides. Row after row, no ends at all. That's running bond. It's how you lay a brick face on a newer house." She handed the tablet back to him. "That is a fine picture of a chimney, Mr. Kellner. It just isn't mine."
Brody looked at the screen. He looked at the wall. He did not say anything.
Loretta took the chip of concrete from her pocket and set it in his palm.
"That came out of my crown on Monday," she said. "Feel how sharp it is. Look how clean. A crack that old in a crown would be black with dirt by now. This one is two days old." She waited. "Same age as your visit."
Walt still had not moved from his fender. He did not need to. Brody was not looking at him. He was looking at the chip of concrete in his hand.
"You ever lay a brick, son?" Loretta asked.
"No, ma'am." It came out quiet.
"Then who sent you?"
He sat down on her back steps, all at once, as if his knees had given out. For a while he didn't speak.
"Fella in Wheeling owns the company," he said finally. "He pays us on deposits. Not on jobs. Deposits. He gave us a folder of pictures. Said folks can't tell one chimney from another." He rubbed his face. "Monday, the guy I ride with went up your ladder while I talked to you on the porch. I didn't watch him. I didn't want to know."
"But you knew."
"Yes, ma'am." He looked up at her. "My girlfriend's due in January. I'm two months behind on rent. That's not an excuse. I'm just telling you."
Loretta had worked beside a lot of young men who got in trouble because somebody older showed them how. She had seen a few of them come out the other side, too.
"I won't be paying you a dime," she said. "And Sheriff Whitaker is going to hear about this company, and so are plenty of widows in this county, because Tyler Kessler is going to put it on the town page before lunch."
Brody nodded. He did not argue.
"But there's a mason in Marietta named Ed Wozniak. He came up in my local in Pittsburgh. He's sixty and his knees are shot, and he told me last month he can't find a laborer who will show up. It's hard work and it's honest pay." She took a pencil out of her coat and wrote the number on the back of his own business card. "You call him. Tell him Loretta sent you. Tell him the truth about how we met, too, or don't bother calling."
Brody looked at the card for a long time. Then he put it in his shirt pocket instead of his jacket.
He drove off without his clipboard. Walt picked it up off the grass and handed it to her.
Saturday morning, the wind blew hard all day, just like Brody said it would. Loretta's chimney did not notice.
She had been up on the roof Friday afternoon with a bucket of mortar and her old pointing trowel, and Walt had stood at the foot of the ladder the whole time with his hands in his pockets. She filled the crack in the crown. She raked out the four bad joints on the north side and pointed them again with a soft mix, the way the original mason would have wanted it.
Walt didn't say a word the entire time. When she came down, he looked up at the work for a full minute.
"That'll do," he said.
From Walt Brenner, she had learned, that was a parade.
Tyler's post had been shared six hundred times by Sunday. Three people in the next county called the sheriff's office to say the same crew had been on their porches.
Denise drove down from Columbus on Sunday afternoon. Loretta walked her around the side of the house and showed her the new joints. Denise looked at them, then at her mother's hands, then back at the chimney.
"You really used to do this," she said.
"For thirty-five years, honey."
Denise did not mention the condo listings once that whole visit. Loretta noticed.
After her daughter's car turned the corner onto Elm, Loretta stood alone in the backyard in the last of the light. She reached out and knocked on the chimney with her knuckle, the way she had knocked on a thousand walls.
It answered the way good brick does, solid and patient, like a wall that planned to stand there another hundred years.
