her bedside table. There was the Philip Roth book she’d been reading before he left. Stri Vectin hand cream. A tube of the raspberry lip balm she had, for years—and in his opinion, very irritatingly—woken to put on in the middle of the night. His brain was able to register what was clear, but he was so surprised, he said, that his legs literally gave way, and he had to sit on the edge of the bed. Because of my father’s occasional back problems, my parents slept on an expensive mattress, the kind made out of the material that has something to do with astronauts—and apparently, it really could withstand the weight of a grown man sitting on the edge of it without disturbing a sleeping man, or even an elderly dog, lying in the middle. So my father had several seconds to look at the roofer’s slackened face, and to notice—to his even further surprise—just how young the interloper was. When I first heard the story from my bewildered and disgusted older sister, the roofer was reported to be about thirty years old. That may have been an exaggeration—to this day, my mother maintains he was closer to forty.
But we can all agree that my father—once he collected his wits—responded to the crisis with characteristic forethought and logic. I wouldn’t put all of this on his training as a lawyer. He is a huge fan of true crime—in his spare time, what little there is of it, he watches cop and private detective shows, Unsolved Mysteries, etc. He dropped the note where he’d found it, stood up, and took a large step away from the bed. His phone had a camera on it. He took it out of his pocket and took a picture of the sleeping man. He found the man’s flannel shirt lying on the floor, and he used it—as he had seen so many television detectives use latex gloves—to pick up my mother’s note. He slipped both articles behind her big oak dresser for safekeeping, and then crept over to his dresser, where he kept the small handgun he had purchased three years earlier after a house several streets away was burglarized—though it was a much nicer house, and the owners had been away at the time, skiing in Aspen.
“He bought that gun so he could tell everyone he bought it,” my mother had said. “He bought it to make me insane.”
And truly, on the snowy afternoon that the discovery of the sleeping roofer gave my father some reason to finally load the gun, he didn’t load it. He wasn’t looking for vengeance, he told me, just the upper hand.
“He could have just asked him to leave,” my mother pointed out later. “Mr. Drama. You know what? He probably could have just cleared his throat.”
But my father did use the gun, the tip of the barrel, to nudge the roofer awake. “Get the hell out of my house,” he said, very calmly, or at least that’s how he told us he said it, with all the quiet bravado of someone who has watched several Clint Eastwood movies in the course of his life. My father does have a trial lawyer’s flair for drama—he tells stories well, and he has a good memory for dialogue. But neither my sister nor I was ever completely convinced that his actual delivery was so tranquil—our father is a very excitable person. He screams when he loses his car keys. He wails when he stubs his toe. In any case, the roofer woke up quickly and found whatever my father said, however he said it, sufficiently clear, and the gun sufficiently motivating. He raised his palms in surrender. He asked permission to stand. To my father’s surprise, the roofer was wearing jeans, his leather belt still buckled. And he wasn’t that physically impressive, now that he was standing up. He was several inches shorter than my father, and though his arms were broad and muscular, he was a little soft in the middle. “Cloud-pale eyelids?” my father asked me later. “Cloud-pale eyelids?”
The roofer, his eyelids now invisible above his wide-awake eyes, asked permission to put on his boots, almost every word, according to my father, followed by an “uhhh” or a “duhhhh” that strongly hinted he was not just temporarily terrified, but also permanently stupid. Of course, my father’s impersonation may not have been accurate or fair. Long after the roofer—his name, I later learned, was Greg Liddiard—returned to Alaska to