THERE IS AT LEAST A FIFTY PERCENT CHANCE THAT IN THE next twenty-four hours, the roof of the cabin I’m renting will collapse and kill me. It’s an apt metaphor for the rest of my life. There’s not much I can do about my shattered life, but the roof issue is more surmountable. I have been calling my landlord, Rudy, for the last month to try and fix it. Every day, I find a few new shingles on the ground next to the cabin, and one day, I’m fairly sure I’ll sit on my living room sofa and look straight up to see the moon. And then a few days ago, my calls became more urgent. There’s a storm coming, and if this roof doesn’t get fixed ASAP, I could die. So I told Rudy he needed to get his butt over here—now. I wasn’t nice, but I said what I had to say. Now, a dozen messages later, Rudy is finally here in the flesh. As we stand together just outside the cabin, Rudy squints up at my roof with his droopy blue eyes. He’s a scrawny man in his late fifties who looks like he only eats one or two nonliquid meals per day. He scratches the gray stubble on his chin and adjusts the worn gray baseball cap he always wears. As usual, he reeks of cigarette smoke. The stench of it was overpowering when I first moved into the cabin, and it took me a week to get it aired out. It still clings to some of the furniture months later. “Looks okay to me, Casey,” he says. My fists clench in barely restrained rage. “How? How does it look okay? There are shingles all over the ground!” I in fact gathered the flat rectangular shingles into a little pile that I now gesture toward angrily. I don’t entirely understand how a roof is constructed, but I know those things are needed to keep it together. The fact that they are falling off does not bode well for my roof. At least this is just a rainstorm. Once it snows in a month or so? Forget it. I’m going to wake up one morning in a snowdrift. I wish I could afford a decent isolated shack in the woods. “It’s not safe,” I insist.