I could Tell You Something (Short Story‪)‬

I'm on the roof pulling shingles and raking piles of them off onto the tarp in the driveway below. Tim is in his truck still. He's on the phone with his wife, and at the edge after the shingles land I can hear his muffled voice. It's like this every morning and in the afternoon too when she calls again. We've fallen behind schedule and I just stand at the edge of the roof with Tim in the truck there below me and I look out over the other houses and the lake and the hills in the distance. There's a breeze but it will be unbearably hot by the time she calls back. We've started one corner with the new shingles and when I go down to get the compressor ready, Tim is there. He follows me back up the ladder and he doesn't say anything. We work all morning and it's nice for a time. But the clouds are gone by lunch and we sit in the shade of a tree at the edge of the roof. I eat and Tim fills up his water bottle from the cooler and says something about not having enough shingles. This is only the third roofing job we've done and I think he's right to worry. We are running out of shingles and we're running out of time, too. If Tim calls in a new order it will be at least two days and it will take us half a day to load them up on the roof.