Twenty-Three Retirees Paid a Fake Crew Using My Company’s Name. The First Snow Was 40 Days Away

Detective Rautio didn’t like it. The prosecutor liked it even less.

But Kaleb turned himself in that afternoon, gave them every name, every phone number, and the forty thousand dollars. He pleaded guilty. And he asked the judge for one thing before sentencing.

Forty days. On my crews. On those roofs.

The judge looked at him over her glasses for a long time. Then at me, sitting behind him in the courtroom.

“Mr. Aalto,” she said to me. “Will you supervise him personally?”

“Every day, Your Honor.”

“Then he can start Monday.”

We put every crew I had on those twenty-three houses. Seven days a week, sunup to sundown. I worked on the roofs myself, which I hadn’t done in fifteen years. My knees told me about it every night.

Kaleb was on every roof. First up the ladder, last one down. He didn’t complain once.

Helvi Korpela made pasties for the crews every day. So did the girls from church. By the second week, we had more pasties than shingles.

We finished the twenty-third roof on October ninth, at four in the afternoon.

It started snowing at eight.

I stood on Helvi’s porch and watched it come down off the lake, big wet flakes, settling on twenty-three new roofs across Marquette.

Kaleb was sentenced in November. Probation, restitution and two hundred hours of community service, which he finished in six weeks, mostly roofing churches.

He works for me again now. He’s good. Better than I was at his age.

Last week, Helvi called the office.

“I’d just like to know,” she said, “when your nephew is coming back.”

“Is something wrong with the roof, Mrs. Korpela?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong with the roof. He promised to fix my porch steps. And he said he’d bring his uncle for coffee.”