Vernon’s wife, Yolanda, greeted Mario and I when we knocked on the door at Vernon’s house. She showed us to the bedroom where Vernon was propped up on pillows with his leg in a cast.
“What happened to you?” Mario asked. “Did you get in a fight?”
“No. Nothing like that. I fell off the roof.”
“How did that happen?”
“It all started twelve years ago.”
Mario said, “It didn’t take you twelve years to fall off a roof.”
“It still started back then. I was doing some work on Newton’s Supermarket in San Ignacio. You remember that place?”
“Yeah,” Mario said. “I had a serious crush on the owner’s daughter, Julie.”
“Twelve years ago, I was building a storeroom on the back of the supermarket for Julie’s father, Mr. Newton. Because my village was so far away, he let me sleep in the storeroom while I was finishing it up.”
“I would have give my right arm to sleep in the same building with Julie Newton.”
Vernon said, “That was before I met Yoli and I hadn’t ever had a girlfriend. One night, Julie came back where I was sleeping and woke me up. She wanted to know if I was O.K. and if there was anything I needed. I told her I was fine. She said if there was anything she could do for me all I had to do was tell her. She hung around awhile longer and then she left.”
“Vernon, sometimes you are just dumb,” Mario said.
“Well, I couldn’t figure out what she meant, and I’ve thought about it every day for twelve years. This morning I went up to put a patch on the roof and all of a sudden it dawned on me what she was talking about. That’s when I fell of the roof.”
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