She meant the roof.
"I knew right away what it was," she said. "I knew from the stairs. I knew that red. I saw it every time I closed my eyes. And I came down and I got close and I could see the type. Not much. Pieces. But I could see a 'Registrar' up by the chimney, and I could see 'dismiss' going right along the gutter, plain as anything, and I stood there and you said, 'Is that okay? You were throwing it out.'" She looked at me. "And I said it's fine."
"I didn't know," I said. My voice was very small. "I swear to God, Krista. I didn't read it. I didn't look."
"I know you didn't. That's the thing. You didn't look. Nobody in this house looks at anything. I've been leaving at ten after seven for two months with an empty backpack. Mom didn't look. You didn't look. And then you put it on the roof and everybody looked at it. Everybody in Erie looked at it. It was in the paper."
You couldn't see the roof very well in the paper. I'd thought that was a shame.
She told us how she'd started going down at night, after we were asleep, and standing in front of the panel with her phone flashlight, and finding the shingles that had gone down face-up, and picking at them with her fingernails. Turning them over. Pressing them back down. She said she did it maybe ten times. I remembered then, standing there, that twice in September I'd come down in the morning and found little bare patches near the peak, a shingle or two missing, the gesso showing through, and I'd been so annoyed. I'd blamed the humidity. I'd thought the gel wasn't holding. I'd gone out and bought a new jar of a different brand, twenty-three dollars, out of my frame-shop money, and complained about it to Mr. Szczepanski for a week.
"I couldn't get them all," Krista said. "There were too many. It was like trying to pick up rice."
"And tonight?" my mother said.
Krista didn't answer. She looked at my mother's satchel, on the recliner, and then she looked at my mother, and something in her face got hard again.