The Rooftop Bees

The rain starts at nine on a Tuesday night, and by ten Walter has a bucket in the middle of his living room floor.

He stands there in his socks, hands on his hips, watching the drip. It comes slow and steady, right off the ceiling in front of the window, plink, plink, plink. He is fifty-five years old, a golf course superintendent, and he knows water. He has spent thirty years moving water around a golf course. Water is supposed to stay where he puts it.

"You have got to be kidding me," he says to the ceiling.

The ceiling does not answer. The drip does it again instead, and a little brown ring shows up around the spot like the ceiling is signing its name.

His daughter, Hallie, moved out three weeks ago. She is thirty, got a job in another state, and the house has been so quiet that Walter talks to the dog more than he used to. Now the house is leaking too, like it is lonely and wants attention. He puts down a second bucket, just in case, and goes to bed with a towel over his pillow and a bad feeling about his morning.

In the morning the bad feeling is right. There is a dinner plate sized stain on the ceiling, and the rain is still coming down. Walter calls a roofer. The roofer says three weeks, maybe four, everybody in the county got hit by the same hailstorm in April, and would Walter like to be on the list. Walter says yes, gets on the list, hangs up, and stands in his driveway feeling sorry for himself.

That is when Maggie comes over.

She lives two doors down, in the little house with the garage out back where she runs a one-woman mechanic shop. Walter has waved at her maybe two hundred times over the four years she has lived there and talked to her maybe four. She is forty-eight, divorced, and built like somebody who wrestles truck engines for a living, which she does. Today she is wearing coveralls with the top folded down and work boots, and she is carrying two cups of coffee.

"Heard your roof lost the fight," she says, holding out one cup.

"How did you hear that?"

"Dolores. She called me at seven this morning. She said, and I quote, the poor man is drowning in his own living room." Maggie grins. "I figured I'd come see the flood myself. Also you looked sad standing out here, so. Coffee."

"Thanks." Walter takes the cup. It is good coffee, which surprises him a little, and he feels bad about being surprised, which surprises him more.

"So this is the situation," Maggie says. "Roofer's gonna be weeks. I know, I'm on the same list. But I patched my own roof last fall when the same thing happened to me, and I've still got the tarp and the roofing cement and the ladder. If you want, I can get up there today and stop the bleeding until your guy comes."

Walter looks at her. Rain drips off the gutter between them.

"You'd do that?"

"Sure. You're gonna feed me lunch, is the deal. That is the whole arrangement. Sandwich and a beer and I'll have your ceiling quiet by dark."

"Deal," Walter says, maybe too fast, and Maggie laughs at him, but it is a nice laugh, not a mean one, and he finds he does not mind being laughed at by her at all.

She shows up at eleven with a tarp over one shoulder, a bucket of black goo in one hand, and a coil of rope, looking like a one-woman disaster crew. Walter has cleaned out the corner of his garage and found an old extension ladder, and the two of them wrestle it up against the side of the house in the drizzle.

"You sure about this?" he asks. "I can go up."

"You can hold the ladder," Maggie says, already climbing. "I do this on my own roof twice a year. Also you look as if you haven't been on a ladder since the Clinton administration and I don't want to catch you."

"I've been on a ladder."

"When?"

Walter thinks about it. "...When Hallie's kite went up the oak tree. She was nine."

"That's what I thought. Hold the ladder, superintendent."

So he holds the ladder, and Maggie goes up it like she was born on one. She is not what he would have pictured a week ago, when his biggest worry was whether the fifteenth green was draining right. She is quick and sure of herself up there, boots finding the shingles like she has done it a hundred times, because of course she has. He watches her walk the edge of the roof in the rain, careful along the wet edge, and he feels something in his chest he has not felt in a long time. He does not have a word for it yet. He files it away.

"Found it!" she hollers after ten minutes. "Come up here, you gotta see this. Careful, it's slick."

Walter climbs up, slower than her and not proud of it. When he gets to the ridge she is standing near the chimney, pointing at the vent stack, where the flashing has peeled up at one corner like the lid of a can.

"There's your leak. Old flashing, wind got under it. Easy fix with the cement." Then she stops, and squints off past the chimney. "Huh."

"What?"

"That's not yours." She points. Wedged up against the chimney, flapping loose in the wind, is a big piece of corrugated metal, half torn loose from something, banging against the brick every time a gust comes through. It is red, rusted at the edges, and definitely not from Walter's house.

"That's my barn door," Maggie says. "Or what's left of it."

"Your barn door flew onto my roof?"

"A panel of it. The wind's been eating that barn all spring. Damn it, I told myself I'd brace it last month and then the shop got busy and I didn't." She is already walking toward it, careful on the wet shingles. "Hold on, I can't leave it up here. Next good gust this thing goes over your ridge and through your back window, or into the street, or through Dolores's picture window, which honestly would be funny, but still."

"Maggie, wait, let me help."

"You're holding the ladder in your head right now. Just stay put and watch me work, it's kind of a show."

It is, kind of. She gets a grip on the panel, works it loose from where the wind has jammed it against the chimney, and for a second the wind catches the whole thing flat and it tries to become a kite with her attached. Walter's stomach drops. But she plants her boots, laughs out loud, and hauls it down flat against the roof.

"Got you, you son of a gun," she says to the metal, patting it like a horse.

She wrestles the panel over to the ladder and down they go with it, Walter carrying the bottom end, her walking backward down the rungs, both of them soaked and grinning by the time it lands in the yard. It is a big red panel, eight feet long, with old barn paint and a hinge still hanging off one side.

"Well," Walter says, looking at it. "That's a first."

"Free salvage, though. I can make a shed out of this. Or a gate." Maggie pushes her wet hair off her face and looks at him, rain running down her nose. "Thanks for the catch assist. Now let me go fix your roof, and then you owe me a sandwich."

"You're getting lunch before you fall off anything else. Come inside, you're soaked."

"So are you, ladder boy."

Inside, she stands dripping on his doormat and looks at the ceiling stain like a doctor looking at an X-ray. "Yeah, that's flashing. I can seal that today. Give me twenty minutes and a dry shirt, if you got one I can borrow, and don't give me one of your good golf shirts, I'll get cement on it."

Walter gets her one of his oldest work shirts, the soft gray one, and while she is changing in the hall bathroom he stands in the kitchen and realizes he is humming. He has not hummed in the house since Hallie left. The dog looks up at him from under the table, suspicious.

"I know," Walter tells him quietly. "Weird, right?"

Up on the roof, twenty minutes later, Maggie sings while she works. He can hear her through the ceiling, some old song he half remembers, and the drip in the living room slows, and stops, and does not come back.

Walter makes two cups of coffee the next morning without thinking about it, and then stands in the kitchen holding the second one and wondering what the heck he is doing. It is seven thirty. Maggie's garage is already open, the light on inside, some radio playing low. He walks the two doors down in his slippers like a fool, changing to boots halfway, and knocks on the door frame.

"You're up early," Maggie says, sliding out from under a pickup truck on a creeper. She has grease on one forearm and his gray shirt on, the soft one, sleeves rolled up. "Is that for me?"

"It is. I figured I owed you more than a sandwich, so I'm starting a tab."

"Well, get in line. The tab includes a barn door, a roof, and my dignity from when you watched me almost fly off your house." She sits up and takes the cup. "Black, right guess?"

"Lucky guess."

"Sit down, there's a stool." She points at an old paint bucket turned upside down near the workbench, and he sits on it, and the coffee is hot and good, and the radio plays something with a fiddle in it.

"So what's the truck in for?" he asks.

"Brake lines. Guy two streets over. He'd rather pay me than the dealer, and I'd rather he did too." She takes a sip and rolls back under the truck, talking from under there. "You sleep okay? No drips?"

"Not one. Ceiling's dry as a bone. There's a stain, but I'm told stains are character."

"They are. So is rust, but nobody believes me." She rolls back out and sits up, wiping her hands on a rag that has clearly given up on being a rag. "So. Hallie, right? Your girl. She moved out three weeks ago?"

"News travels."

"Dolores travels news. Two doors down, remember. She came by yesterday asking if I saw who stole your roof." Maggie grins. "How you doing with it? The empty house thing."

Walter looks into his coffee for a second. "You know, I spent thirty years moving water around a golf course. Irrigation, pumps, drains. You get so a house full of noise is just normal, and then one Tuesday night the noise moves to another state for a job, and the quiet is loud. Does that make sense?"

"Perfect sense. Mine went quiet ten years ago, different reasons, but the quiet part is the same." She gets up and leans against the workbench. "First month is the worst. You'll set two plates without thinking, then stand there like an idiot. I used to set two of everything."

"You still do?"

"Coffee, sometimes. The dog gets the second cup's company, if that makes any sense."

"It does." Walter is quiet a second. "The dog appreciates it, I'm sure."

They both laugh, and it feels easy, and Walter notices that too and files it away with the thing from yesterday in his chest.

"Okay, question," Maggie says. "My barn door is hanging by one hinge, and the other hinge is shot. I got the panel back, thanks again, but I can't hold an eight-foot door and swing a hammer at the same time. You free this afternoon?"

"Free as a bird. What do I do?"

"Hold the door and look handsome. Mostly the holding part."

He spends the afternoon doing exactly that, sort of. Maggie talks the whole time, and Walter learns more about hinges in three hours than he learned in fifty-five years. She explains how the old barn doors were hung, why the bottom hinge fails first, how you shim a sagging frame with a cedar shake. Her hands know exactly what every next move is before she makes it.

"Golf course, huh," she says at one point, drilling a pilot hole. "You like it?"

"Love it, most days. People think it's just grass. It's not. It's water management, mostly. Thirty years of figuring out where the water wants to go and talking it into going somewhere else. Every sprinkler head on that course, I could walk it blind."

"That's the same job I got," Maggie says, tapping the hinge into place. "Engines are just water too, in a way. Flow, pressure, blockages. Everything moves through a channel and you figure out where it's pinched."

Walter stares at her. "That's exactly it. That's exactly what I do."

"Course it is. Mechanics and irrigation guys, we're the same animal." She swings the door on its new hinges. It glides shut with a soft thump. "There. Good as new. Door's fixed, tab's still open."

"My tab's getting long," Walter says, and then, before he can think better of it, "I heard you sing on my roof yesterday."

Maggie stops. "You heard that, huh."

"Through the ceiling. It was nice. You should charge extra for it."

"Careful, I might." But she is smiling, and she takes the hammer out of his hand like he is done with it.

Then, on Friday, she calls him. Actually calls, on the phone, which surprises him enough that he lets it ring twice before answering.

"Got something to show you," she says. "You said you'd never seen a beehive up close. Hotel on Fifth Street, the conference place, I keep two hives on their roof. I'm doing a check Saturday morning. Want to come up?"

"Up on the roof?"

"There's a service elevator. I asked the manager, he said bring your friend. So, you coming or not?"

"I'm coming," Walter says, and hangs up, and stands in his kitchen feeling like someone who just got asked to the dance.

Saturday morning is bright and cool. Maggie meets him at the loading dock in a white bee jacket, and hands him a second one that smells like smoke.

"You'll want the veil down," she says. "Bees are fine, but they don't know you yet."

The elevator rides up twelve floors, and the doors open onto the roof, and Walter stops dead.

There are two white boxes, plain as anything, humming. That is the part that gets him. He expected quiet and got a low, alive hum, like a transformer full of music. Bees