The young man on Loretta Simms's porch said her chimney was one good wind from falling, and he had a picture on his tablet to prove it.
"See that?" He tapped the screen. "Crown's cracked clean through. Mortar's gone in the joints. One more good wind, ma'am, and you've got four hundred pounds of brick on your porch roof."
Loretta looked at the picture. Then she looked at him.
He was about thirty-five, with a clean jacket that said Tri-State Chimney and Roof and a smile that had been practiced on a lot of porches. His name was Brody Kellner. His pickup sat at the curb on Maple Street with a ladder rack and an out-of-state plate. His partner had already been up and down an aluminum ladder at the side of the house before Loretta finished her coffee.
"Eighty-four hundred," he said. "Half today to hold the crew. We can start Monday. With that wind coming this weekend, I wouldn't wait."
Loretta was sixty-nine. She had been in Pine Hollow since April, when she sold the row house in Pittsburgh after Frank passed. She had bought the little 1924 house on Maple Street because it had good bones and a garden and was an hour closer to her daughter in Columbus.
Most of the neighbors knew her as the new widow with the tomato plants. Few of them knew she had laid brick for thirty-five years.
She had joined the bricklayers' union in 1979, when the men on her first crew took bets on how long she would last. She lasted until 2014. She had built church steps, school walls, and more chimneys than she could count. Her hands still had the calluses, and she still had the habit Frank used to tease her about. She knocked on brick with her knuckle the way other people knock on wood. A good wall answers you.
She looked at the picture on Brody's tablet a moment longer. Something about it bothered her, like a song played in the wrong key. She could not have said what.
"I'd like to go up and look," she said.
Brody laughed politely. "Ma'am, I can't let you do that. Insurance."
"It's my roof."
"Yes, ma'am. And it's my job to keep you off it." He handed her a card. "I'll swing back Wednesday at ten for the deposit. Don't let it go too long."
Her daughter called that evening, the way she did every Monday.
"Mom, if the man says it's dangerous, pay him," Denise said. "You're sixty-nine. You are not climbing on a roof. This is exactly why I keep sending you those condo listings."
"I've been on higher roofs than this one in January."
"In 1985, Mom."
Loretta hung up and went to stand in the backyard in the dark. The chimney rose up the side of the house against the stars. From the ground, it looked fine to her. Straight. Tight. But she had been fooled from the ground before.
Tuesday morning, she took the tablet picture problem to Dot's Corner Diner, because half of Maple Street did.
Tyler Kessler was behind the counter. He was twenty-four and had come home from a tech job in Columbus, and by now half the older folks in Calder County brought him their strange phone calls and their strange emails.
He looked up Tri-State Chimney and Roof on his phone while Loretta ate a fried egg sandwich.
"Website looks nice," he said. "Forty-two reviews. All five stars." He scrolled. "And all posted the same week in March. That's not a good sign. But it's not proof either, Mrs. Simms. Crews come through after every windstorm. Some of them are honest."
"Some of them aren't."
"Please don't climb on your roof."
"That makes three people this week," Loretta said, and paid her bill.
She found Walt Brenner at Calder Feed and Seed, buying a box of deck screws. She had met him in the spring, when he had come to look at her porch posts and told her they were fine and charged her nothing for saying so.
"Walt, I need to borrow a twenty-eight-foot ladder," she said. "And somebody to foot it."
Walt looked at her for a long moment. He was seventy-six and did not waste words. Then he looked at her hands.
"Brick?" he asked.
"Thirty-five years."
"Tomorrow at nine," he said. "I'll be late. I've got a delivery at eight-thirty."
Wednesday came up cold and clear. Walt had dropped off his ladder at eight and set it against her house himself, at a good angle, with the feet dug in. Then he had gone out Route 9 with his delivery.
Loretta waited ten minutes. Then she decided a ladder this well set did not need a man standing at the bottom of it, and climbed.
She went up the way she always had. Three points of contact, eyes on the rung ahead, no hurry. At the top, she stepped onto the porch roof and walked carefully up to where the chimney met the shingles.
Up close, it was a good chimney. Old red brick, laid by somebody who knew what he was doing a hundred years ago. The mortar was soft and sandy, the way old mortar ought to be. A few joints wanted pointing. That was all.
Then she looked at the crown on top.
There was a crack in it, just as Brody's picture said. It ran from one corner almost to the flue. But the edges of it were sharp and clean, and the dust in it was pale gray, as fresh as flour. When she ran her thumb along it, the dust came away on her skin.
In the gutter by her knee lay a little chip of concrete. She turned it over. The broken face was bright and clean.
Cracks that have weathered a single winter turn dark. They collect grit and pollen and soot. This one had not seen one rain.
Loretta heard a truck door shut on Maple Street.
She looked down. Brody Kellner was crossing her front yard, forty minutes early, with a clipboard under his arm. He saw her on the roof and stopped.
Then he walked to the foot of the ladder, set his clipboard down on the grass, and put both hands on the rails.
"Mrs. Simms," he called up, friendly as a church usher. "Come on down now, and we'll get you signed."