My father looked up.
"But I do want some things," I said. "Not for me. For the record. Mom, I want you to call Mr. Hale at Vanderbilt and tell him what happened. Not so he can do anything. He can't. Just so someone in that office knows the truth about my file, in your voice. He's been carrying my file around for six months not knowing."
My mother nodded. She was writing it down. My mother, who had run a church office for nineteen years, was writing my demands on the back of Grandma Ida's envelope in her neat Palmer-method hand.
"Dad." I made myself look at him. "You stood in our yard in front of forty people and told them Grant was in the training room every morning at five-thirty and that you were rewarding him. Mrs. Abernathy still asks Tasha's mom about my brother the linebacker. I want you to tell them. Not a speech. You don't have to rent a tent. Just—when they ask how your boy's doing, you tell them he's a paramedic. You tell them he saved a man in a Dollar General. You tell them the car's gone and why. And when they ask about me, you say Josie's going to Vanderbilt, a year late, because of something you did. Every time. Until it's not a hard sentence anymore."
My father's jaw worked.
"That's what you want," he said. "You want me humiliated."
"No sir," I said. "I want you to be accurate. I'm an engineer. Accurate is the only thing I want from anybody."
Grant made a small sound beside me that might have been a laugh. My father looked at him, and then at me, and then at my mother, who had stopped writing and was looking back at him over the envelope with an expression I couldn't read and I don't think he could either.
"I'll think about it," he said.
"Okay," I said. "That's more than I expected."
* * *
Afterward, on the sidewalk on Georgia Avenue, in the heat coming up off the concrete, Grant and I stood by the Silverado and didn't say anything for a while.
"The check," I said finally. "The seventy-one thousand."
"It's yours."
"I don't need it now. Lorraine's paying Vanderbilt. I've got the Engineers Club money." I took a breath. "Paramedic school's at Chattanooga State, right? Two years, after your EMT cert? And you're paying for it with AutoZone shifts."
"Jo."