The invoice said forty-two squares of shingles, and Loretta Calloway's roof wasn't but twenty-one.
She read it twice at her kitchen table with her reading glasses on and a cup of coffee going cold. Then she got out her late husband's adding machine from the hall closet, plugged it in, and ran the numbers herself.
Twenty-one and a half squares. Maybe twenty-two, if you were generous with the waste.
Loretta was seventy-three. She'd kept the books for Gulf Coast Builders in Mobile, Alabama, for thirty years, from 1979 until the owner retired. She had read roughly ten thousand roofing invoices in her life.
She knew a padded one when she saw it.
Old Mr. Dupree, who'd owned Gulf Coast Builders, used to say a roofing invoice was the easiest bill in the world to pad, and the easiest to catch, if a person knew the arithmetic. Loretta had caught more than a few. Most of them had been from subcontractors who figured the bookkeeper wouldn't check.
The storm had come through Magnolia Bend on the second Sunday in January. It wasn't a tornado, though the TV people said there'd been one twenty miles north. It was straight-line wind, seventy miles an hour for ten minutes, and it peeled back the shingles on half the houses on Pecan Street like a man peeling an orange.
Loretta's roof had lost a strip along the ridge and a big patch on the back side. Rain had come in through the bedroom ceiling. She'd put pots under it and called around, but every roofer in Baldwin County had a waiting list a month long.
Then on Wednesday, a white pickup with CAGLE ROOFING on the door had pulled into her driveway.
The man who got out was about forty-five, sunburned, polite, with a clipboard and a Bible verse on the back of his business card. Travis Cagle.
He said he'd grown up in Bay Minette. He said he could start Monday.
He walked around her house once and looked up at the roof.
"Full replacement," he said. "Tear it all off, new felt, new shingles, new ridge cap. Probably replace some decking. Call it ninety-eight hundred, give or take."
Ninety-eight hundred was fair. Loretta had looked up what roofs were going for. She said yes.
His crew came on Monday. Five men and a dumpster. Loretta sat on the front porch in her cardigan and watched them work, the way she'd watched crews work for thirty years, because she'd always found it helped to know what you were paying for.
They tore off the old shingles. One layer, down to the wood.
She'd known it would be one layer. She and Cliff had paid for a full tear-off in 2004, and she still had the receipt in the file cabinet in the spare room.
They pulled up some rotten decking at the back corner where the rain had come in. She counted the sheets as they came down. Six.
She counted the new sheets going up. Six.
They laid new felt. They laid new shingles.
By Wednesday afternoon, they were done, and the roof looked good. She told Travis so.
On Thursday, the invoice came in the mail.
Forty-two squares of architectural shingles. Two layers tear-off and disposal. Thirty sheets of seven-sixteenths decking.
Labor. Twenty-one thousand, four hundred dollars.
She called Travis that afternoon.
He came out on Friday and stood in her kitchen with his cap in his hands. He was polite. He listened while she went down the invoice line by line.
"My roof isn't forty-two squares, Mr. Cagle," she said. "A square is a hundred square feet. My house is about seventeen hundred and fifty square feet on the ground, with the overhang. It's a six-twelve pitch. That's twenty-one squares, maybe twenty-two with waste."
Travis smiled at her. It was a nice smile, the kind you'd give your grandmother.
"Ma'am," he said, "with all due respect, roofing math isn't like regular math. There's the pitch factor, the waste factor, starter strip, ridge cap. It adds up fast. I wouldn't expect you to understand all that."
Loretta looked at him over her reading glasses.
"Two layers?" she said.
"There were two layers. Somebody'd roofed right over the old one."
"There was one."
"Ma'am, my crew tore it off. I think they'd know."
"And thirty sheets of decking."
"We found a lot of rot," Travis said. "A lot more than you could see from the ground. I'm sorry. That's what happens with old roofs."
He picked up the invoice off her table, folded it neatly, and handed it back to her.
"I gave you a ballpark, ma'am. This is the real number. I'd appreciate it by the end of the month."
He thanked her for the coffee and left.
Loretta sat at her kitchen table for a long time after he'd gone.
She thought about calling her son in Atlanta, and decided not to. She thought about calling a lawyer, and decided she wasn't there yet. Then she got up and went to the spare room and opened the file cabinet.
On Saturday morning at eight o'clock, the white pickup was back in her driveway.
Travis didn't come in this time. He stood on the porch and handed her a single sheet of paper through the screen door, and he didn't smile.
"I'm sorry it's come to this, Mrs. Calloway," he said.
At the top of the paper, in bold capital letters, it said NOTICE OF INTENT TO FILE LIEN.