I carried the clipboard. Then I carried the tablet with the inspection software. Then I carried the hammer, which is how you sound concrete; you tap it and listen, and good concrete rings and bad concrete thuds, like a melon. By July Mags let me write the first drafts of the condition narratives, and then she took them back covered in red pen, and I rewrote them, and she covered them in red pen again, and once, in early August, she handed one back with only three marks on it and said, "Good. That is the report of an engineer." I went and sat in the truck for a minute after that.
I wore closed-toe shoes.
Mags didn't talk about my family. She'd said she wouldn't and she didn't. But some days, on the long drives, she talked about hers. About her father, who'd been a civil servant in the ministry of works and had built, she said, at least three bridges that were still standing and one that was not, which he never spoke of. About the nine years.
"What ended it?" I asked her once, on the way back from Dunlap, with the sun going down orange over the Cumberland Plateau. "The nine years."
Mags drove for a while.
"He wrote me a letter," she said. "A real one. With paper. Four pages. He did not say he was sorry. Nigerian men of his generation do not say they are sorry, it is not a sound their mouths can make. But on page three he wrote down the name of every bridge I had designed, in order, with the years. He had been keeping track. My mother had been sending him newspaper clippings. He had all of them." She was quiet. "I thought, Well. A man who knows the names of my bridges is a man I can at least have tea with. So I had tea with him. And then I had tea with him again. That is all reconciliation is, I think, Josephine. Tea, again. Not a big scene. Many small cups."
"What if he hadn't known the names?"
"Then I would not have had tea," Mags said, "and I would have been fine. That is the part nobody tells you. You are allowed to be fine either way."
* * *
In June I won the Chattanooga Engineers Club scholarship, twelve thousand dollars, renewable for four years if I kept a 3.2. I'd written the essay on the Walnut Street Bridge, and the truss, and my grandmother's hand.
I was saving almost everything from Oduya and Pell. Mrs. Greer wouldn't take rent. She took groceries, finally, after a fight, and I cleaned the bathrooms on Saturdays without being asked because I needed to be useful somewhere in that house. When Tasha left for Knoxville in August, Mrs. Greer moved my duffel bag into Tasha's room herself while I was at work, and when I came home there was a new lamp on the nightstand and a card that said This is your room until it isn't. Love, R.