I set my hammer down on the shingles real slow, because the folded paper tucked under that fresh felt was a letter, and it began, TO WHOEVER LIVES UNDER THIS ROOF NOW.
The fresh patch was laid by a son, over his fathers roof, and under it he had left a letter to the strangers who would live in the house his father loved.
The man who hired me had bought the place from an estate a few months back. The roofer who had laid that patch was the previous owners son, and he had done it himself, though roofing was not his trade, because his father had built that house and he could not bear to sell it with a leak over the bedroom his father had died in.
So he climbed up, a grieving man doing careful work, and he fixed the roof the honest way, opening it up and mending the cracked flashing underneath that no quick patch would have caught. And when the work was done and the felt was down, he slid a letter beneath it, because he knew the only person who would ever find it was the next man on that roof, years from now, and he wanted his father remembered by a stranger long after the family was gone.
The letter told the story of the house. His father had raised four kids under this roof. He had sat on the porch every evening of his life. He had taught his boy to work with his hands right here, on this very roof, patching this very kind of leak, forty years ago. The son wrote that fixing it one last time was the closest thing to sitting with his father he had left.
At the end he wrote, I do not know you, but you live where good people lived. Be happy here. And if you are the roofer who found this, thank you for treating my fathers house kindly. We are a brotherhood, you and I, the men who keep the rain off the people we love.
Twenty-five years on roofs and I have read a lot of weather. I never read anything like that.
I carried the letter down and gave it to the man who hired me, and I told him what the water stain on his ceiling had really been, which was a son saying goodbye to his father, one shingle at a time.
He had the letter framed. It hangs in the hallway now, under the very spot where I finished the repair.
The leak is fixed. It was never really about the water. It was about a man who climbed up alone to love his father one last time, and trusted the rain to send the next of us up to find it.