The new kid, Delroy, who was nineteen and had not yet learned to stop asking things, said, "What are you buying, Mr. Cole?"
Ramiro looked at the kid and then at Alton, and Alton saw him decide not to answer for him.
"A van," Alton said.
"Like a work van?"
"No."
The kid waited. Above them the stripped roof of the split-level showed its pale bare decking, with that look a stripped roof has, of a body on a table. Alton looked at it because it was easier than looking at the kid.
"It's for my son," he said. "It's got a ramp in the side. The floor's lowered. He rolls right up in it in his chair and locks down, and he rides up front next to whoever's driving, instead of in the back like a package."
"Oh," the kid said. And then, because he was nineteen, "What happened to him?"
"Delroy," Ramiro said.
"It's all right." Alton put his gloves back on, though they were still damp. "He fell off a roof."
He went up the ladder before the kid could think of what to say to that, and he worked through the afternoon on the north face, where the sun was off them, setting the starter course and then the first rows of architectural shingle, the gun thumping in his hand in that rhythm that was so old to him it was like a pulse he could hear. Four nails a shingle, six on the high-wind side. Alton did not clip in, because they were on a six-twelve pitch and he had been walking six-twelve roofs since he was seventeen, and then, halfway up the second course, he stopped, and went back down the ladder, and got his harness out of the truck, and put it on, and clipped the lanyard to the anchor Ramiro had screwed into the ridge that morning. Ramiro, up at the valley, looked over at him and said nothing. It was not the first time Alton had done this. It happened two or three times a month, a kind of weather that came up in him without warning.