"What'd he say?" I asked.
"Nothing, for a long time. Then he asked me if I knew what I'd done to him. Not what I'd done. What I'd done to him." Grant breathed out. "And I said, Dad, I've been doing things to myself for twelve years so you'd have something to say at Rotary. And he got up and went out to the garage, and I heard him in there. Not yelling. Just—I don't know. Moving things around."
"And Mom?"
"Mom asked me if I was eating enough." He laughed a little. "And then she asked me if the EMT thing had health insurance. And then she started crying and said, I didn't know, I didn't know, which—I don't know if she meant about me or about something else. She said it like five times."
Dad came back in at dinnertime and told Grant that if he was a grown man who made his own decisions, he could make his own rent. Grant moved out the following Saturday, into a two-bedroom over a vape shop on Dayton Boulevard with another EMT student named Luis Carrasco, who played the trombone and was, Grant said, the cleanest man alive.
He drove the M4 to Knoxville on Wednesday as promised. They gave him seventy-one thousand three hundred dollars for it. Seventeen thousand three hundred and forty dollars of my grandmother's tomatoes and birthday checks had evaporated in eight weeks and three hundred and twelve miles. I did that math too. I couldn't help it.
* * *
The summer was the hardest I have ever worked and, I think, the happiest I had been since I was fifteen, which I didn't expect, and which I felt guilty about, and which Mags told me to stop feeling guilty about because guilt is just ego with its shoes on backward.
Oduya and Pell had a contract with the Tennessee Department of Transportation for routine inspections on about two hundred bridges across five counties, and in the summer they ran two field crews. I was on Mags's. We'd leave Market Street at six in the morning in a white Ford F-250 with a ladder rack and an orange light bar, and drive out to places I'd lived near my whole life and never seen: a steel girder bridge over the Hiwassee where the paint was coming off in sheets the size of dinner plates; a timber bridge in Rhea County so old Mags made me take forty photographs of it just because she said it deserved to be remembered.