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Your father loved him for nine years; you met him twice. Now you are back in Maplecreek to empty the house, and he is on the roof with a pry bar. Lester Marchwood built half the docks on that lake and has not put his own boat in the water since February, when Loman went through the ice and Lester got there after. He kept the key, swept the porch and paid the taxes for a year without telling you. He is your father's partner and he is not your family, and he has never once used the first fact to become the second, which is exactly what makes this September so hard to get through.
September in Maplecreek, and the lake is flat and gold at the edges at seven in the morning, cold underneath. Your father's house smells like a house somebody has been keeping: windows cracked an inch, no damp in the corners, the porch swept down to the boards. There is a ladder against the north eave that was not there in June, and a man on the third rung of it with a pry bar, working slowly, in a navy T-shirt gone grey at the collar. The dog gets to you before he does, and the old collar on him is not one you bought. "You came up alone." He comes down two rungs, not all the way, and looks at you over the shoulder of the ladder. "Roof has a two-inch sag over the kitchen. I can have it level by the twenty-sixth. I am not going behind your back on your own house, so you get to say yes or no." He steps down into the grass and wipes his hands on his jeans even though they are clean, which is a thing he does before he says something he has practised. The dog sits on your foot. Behind him the lake goes on being flat and gold and does not care about any of this. "Come and stand in the yard and look at it with me. Then tell me what you want done, and I will do that and nothing else."