Up on the Rooftop Read Online Free PDF

snow. Crews worked everywhere, repairing power lines or putting up signs telling people to stay away from lines.
    No wonder people looked so sad. She hadn’t quite realized the extent of the devastation before. The North Pole knew how to deal with snow from September to May; apparently here, in New England, they did not.
    Then she saw what she was looking for: a flatbed truck with snow equipment. It was parked on a road in front of a house, and there he was, in the driveway with a snow blower, sending fresh wet snow in an arc onto what had probably been the lawn.
    “There,” she said, pointing.
    “Can’t,” Delbert said. “No kids. Not this year, and probably not next.”
    “I don’t care about the roof,” she said. “I want to talk to the guy with the snow blower.”
    “You know that’s not allowed,” Delbert said.
    “And you know if you were right, we couldn’t get hotel rooms with the Greater World money that we’re earning. I want to land on his lawn.”
    “He doesn’t have a lawn,” Delbert said. “That’s a pile of snow. And if we land anywhere near the removal equipment, snow will land on us and make us visible.”
    “So land on the other side,” she said, not hiding her exasperation.
    “Why is this so important to you?” he asked.
    “It just is,” she said. And she realized that was her answer. She couldn’t leave their parting like it had been. She needed to talk with the handsome man one more time.
    Delbert sighed and ran his hand on that countertop. The sleigh veered slightly to the left, making Julka lose her vision of the street and the snow blower. Then the sleigh settled out and hovered its way down, using its mechanical rudders.
    The sleigh landed near that nifty staircase. Julka got out of the sleigh on the far side and sank into the snow up to her knees. She cursed (hoped Delbert didn’t hear her since cursing outside the sleigh was a reportable offense), and used her rooftop magic to skim along the top of the snow to a side street. Then she brushed herself off as best she could, and walked down the icy street as if she had come from the Burger King.
    She wasn’t quite sure how to play this. “Yoo-hoo!” seemed too casual. “Hi!” probably impossible to hear over that blower. Walking up behind the handsome man and tapping him on the shoulder would probably scare him to death.
    So she waited at the edge of the cleared-off area, and waited until he shut down the blower midway through the job, probably to take a short rest.
    “Um,” she said, wishing she had planned this better. “Excuse me?”
    He still jumped like she had screamed at him. He turned around fast, nearly lost his balance on the ice, and had to use the handles of the snow blower to catch himself.
    “Um,” he said. “Hi.”
    He sounded confused. Indeed, he was looking at her as if he wasn’t sure if she was real.
    She smiled at him and walked (carefully) up the slick driveway. “I just…you’re a banker right?”
    He let out a small sigh, and then shook his head. “No, I’m not a banker. I’m not anything really. I’m retired.”
    Judging from his tone of voice, she had asked the wrong thing. But she had committed herself to this, and she wasn’t going to back off.
    “Retired?” she asked. “I thought only really old people retired.”
    He smiled. The smile was small, reluctant, as if he didn’t smile all that often. “It’s a nice way of saying I quit.”
    So she had said something wrong again. Maybe reading and studying customs wasn’t quite the same as understanding them.
    “Oh,” she said. “I thought in New England that retiring was mandatory at a certain age.”
    He frowned, then barked out a laugh. “In New England?”
    “That’s where we are, right?”
    “Yes, but—where are you from?”
    She couldn’t answer that. She had to give the company’s stock answer, which she felt wasn’t complete enough. “Up north,” she said.
    “Canada?” he asked. “I thought Canadians