There was one roll left, and the hook it hung on had bent downward from years of holding more. The pegboard behind it showed the clean squares where the other rolls had been, brighter than the sunned board around them, six ghosts and one survivor.
I lifted it off. Heavier than it should be for its size, which is how you know a full roll from a nearly-gone one without looking. The end had been started and pressed back down by somebody’s thumb, a gray tab lifting at one corner, and grit had gotten into the adhesive there so it would never lie flat again. The wrapper was gone. Just the naked roll, the cardboard core crushed a little oval from the hook.
Six dollars. In town it was closer to four. But town was an hour, and the tarp on the woodpile was already lifting at the grommet, and the roll was here, in my hand, doing the one thing duct tape does before you even buy it, which is exist at the moment something has come apart.
I pressed my thumbnail into the edge of the roll to find the start of the tape, and it gave that small tacky resistance, the pull that means it will hold if you warm it and press it and don’t ask it to bend around a corner too tight. Cold, it would peel by spring. Everything up here peels by spring. You buy it knowing that. You buy the season, not the fix.
I carried it to the counter. On the empty hook behind me, the bent wire kept its downward curve, holding the shape of a weight that was no longer there.