I’m not climbing up there to fix your mistake,” my father-in-law said. “You made your bed, Brad. Sleep under it.”
I was standing in my daughter’s bedroom when he said it, holding the phone with one hand and a stock pot under a drip with the other.
The ceiling over her bed had a brown ring in it the size of a truck tire.
It was a Sunday afternoon in early July. The storm had come through right after church, hard and sideways, and it had peeled the tarp I put on our roof back like the lid on a sardine can.
“Dewey,” I said, “I’m not asking you to do the job. I’m asking you to help me tear it off so I can do it myself. You’ve got the ladders. You know how.”
“I know how,” he said. “That was the whole point. You didn’t want to hear from somebody who knows how.”
Then he hung up. Not mad. Just done. That was always the worst of it with Dewey Haase. He never raised his voice. He just closed a door and let you stand outside it.
My wife, Tara, had come in behind me. She took the phone out of my hand, looked at it like it belonged to somebody else, and set it face down on the dresser. Then she went and got a second pot.
Our daughter was sitting on the couch in the front room with her stuffed rabbit in her lap, watching the water come down through the hall light fixture.
She was eight. She didn’t say a word. She just pulled her feet up onto the cushion so they would not get wet.
I want to tell this right, so I have to go back a little.
My name is Brad Ostendorf. I’m thirty-nine. I’m a maintenance mechanic at a grain processing plant in central Illinois, which means I keep conveyors, pumps, dryers and elevator legs running for men who would rather not think about them.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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