The last payment went into the envelope on a Friday in October, at a quarter past noon, on the tailgate of a 2009 Ford F-250 parked in the side yard of a split-level house on Pecan Hollow Drive, while three men ate sandwiches in the shade of a sweetgum tree and pretended not to watch.
Alton Cole counted it twice. He counted everything twice; it was a habit from thirty-four years of estimating roofs, where the difference between twenty-eight squares and thirty-two squares was the difference between a job that paid and a job that ate you. Fifteen twenty-dollar bills, soft from his wallet. He squared them on the tailgate, slid them into a bank envelope that had gone furry at the corners, and wrote on the front of it in carpenter's pencil, under the thirty other dates already written there in a column that had crept onto the back: 10/9. $300. LAST.
He underlined LAST. Then, because he felt foolish, he licked the flap and pressed it shut and put the envelope in the inside pocket of his canvas jacket, where it lay against his ribs like a second, flatter heart.
"That it?" Ramiro said from the shade. Ramiro Tavares had worked on Alton's crew for eleven years and had a way of asking questions with his mouth full that made them sound less important than they were.
"That's it."
"So today."
"Today." Alton pulled off his gloves and laid them on the tailgate, palms up, the way his father had taught him, so the sweat could dry out of them. "If you still want to carry me over there after."
"I said I would."
"I know what you said."
"Then why you asking?" Ramiro balled up the wax paper from his sandwich and lobbed it into the bed of the truck. "Five o'clock. I'll be clean. I'll even put on a shirt with buttons. Make you look like you got a driver."