Chapter 6: The Roof

The note was under my door on Monday night, folded once, in small upright handwriting.

The cannery roof, if you want air that isn't ours. Ten o'clock. You choose whether to come.

I stood in the east hall with it in my hand for a full minute.

Then I put my coat on and went.

There was a ladder bolted to the back wall of the cannery, past the dumpsters and the stacked lobster crates.

Rainer was already at the top, sitting on the tar roof with his overcoat spread under him and his long legs drawn up.

The whole harbor lay below us, black water and strings of mooring lights.

"You came," he said.

"I wanted air."

"I thought you'd want to throw something at me."

"I did. I had a carbon in my pocket, but it seemed a waste."

That earned the corner of his mouth again.

I sat down at a respectable distance.

For a while neither of us said anything, and the wind came in cold off the water.

"Dinner," he said.

"Dinner."

"You asked him a plain question in front of two hundred years of family silver."

"It was a small table."

"I have never once seen my father run out of things to say."

He turned a pen in his fingers, the black one.

"I was nine," he said, "the first time he stood a man on that dais."

"A fisherman. He cried."

"My father told me to look."

"He said, 'That is what a ledger is, Rainer.'"

"It is a way of making a grown man cry without raising your voice."

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