He hung up.
"Oduya and Pell Structural," he said. "They're on Market Street, across from the aquarium. They do bridge inspections for TDOT, structural assessments, some design. Mags is the best engineer I know and the most terrifying human being I have ever met. She will work you very hard and pay you eighteen dollars an hour, which is not enough. Wear closed-toe shoes."
"Mr. Okonjo, I—"
"Calder," he said, "you are going to say thank you, and I am going to say you are welcome, and then you are going to finish this problem set, which is due Wednesday, because the universe does not suspend Newton's laws for family difficulties."
* * *
Margaret Oduya was about five feet tall and wore a hard hat even indoors when she was thinking, a habit she said she'd picked up from a supervisor in Lagos who claimed it kept his ideas from escaping. Her office smelled like burnt coffee and blueprint toner.
She didn't interview me so much as test me. She gave me a set of drawings for a county bridge over South Chickamauga Creek and asked me to find what was wrong with them. I found the bearing detail that didn't match the elevation, and a load table where someone had used the wrong unit weight for the deck overlay. I missed the scour note. She showed me the scour note.
"Scour," she said, "is when the river takes the ground out from under the pier. Quietly. Over years. Nobody sees it. The bridge looks fine. Then one spring there is a flood and the bridge is in the creek and everyone says, How could this happen, it looked fine. That is what kills bridges, Miss Calder. Not the big dramatic loads. The slow taking away of what holds them up."
I must have made some kind of face, because she looked at me for a long second over her reading glasses.
"Okonjo told me a little," she said. "Not much. Enough. I will not ask you about it. I will tell you one thing and then we will not discuss it again unless you choose to." She took off the hard hat and set it on the desk. "My father paid for my brothers' schooling in England and told me I should be grateful to study in Ibadan, which was a very good university, by the way, I had no complaints about Ibadan. When I got my scholarship to come to