Her grandmother had said, "Elephants remember everything they ever learned."
Amara had said, "That's a metaphor."
Her grandmother had looked at Winston, who was standing in the kitchen doorway, and they had both smiled in the specific way that adults smile when a child says something that reveals they are going to be fine. Eleanor Beaumont was 78 now, still mathematically sharp, and Amara called her every Sunday morning without being reminded.
He pulled into the pickup line at 2:40. The pickup window was 3:00. He was 20 minutes early, which was his habit. He had found in three years of pickup line management that arriving 20 minutes early meant a position in the first third of the line, which meant exiting Thorndale Avenue before the main departure congestion, which saved 11 to 14 minutes on the route home. He had timed this. He was a civil engineer, and he timed things as a natural consequence of being someone who thinks about flow and capacity and optimization. He had not mentioned to Amara that he timed the pickup line; she would have found this interesting and asked many questions, and he would have enjoyed the questions, but they had not been on that subject yet.
He had been thinking about the city's water authority project during the drive. It was a stormwater drainage capacity assessment for a district that had experienced three significant flooding events in the previous eight years, each more severe than the last, each traced to the same underestimated peak flow coefficient that had been in the original 1987 drainage plan and had never been corrected because the correction would require acknowledging the original miscalculation.
He had presented his preliminary findings to the authority's engineering review board two weeks ago. The board had said the findings were—and he remembered the exact word—inconvenient.
He had said, "Inconvenient for the infrastructure, or inconvenient for the 1987 assessment?"
The board chair had said, "Both."
He had said, "I understand. The findings are still accurate."
The board had scheduled a follow-up meeting. He had prepared a supplemental analysis for the follow-up meeting that contained 12 additional data points that made the original findings, if anything, more emphatic.