Calder Custom Docks didn't survive. My father sold the equipment to a competitor in Soddy-Daisy in December, paid off Lakeshore Aluminum and most of the IRS, and went to work for that competitor as a crew lead, building other men's docks on the same lake for an hourly wage. My mother told me he came home the first week and sat in the truck in the driveway for an hour before he came in. She told me he goes in now at six every morning, and that he's good at it, and that he seems, she said, carefully, like it might be a relief.
I worked for Mags through that winter and spring, through ice on the Sequatchie and pollen on everything, and she let me go the following August with a hard hat with my name stenciled on the back and a reference letter so effusive I was embarrassed to give it to anyone. She said I could come back every summer as long as I wanted, and she said it in a voice that made clear she was not asking. Mr. Okonjo came by the Market Street office on my last day to make sure, he said, that Mags had not broken me, and the two of them argued about a moment of inertia problem from 2004 for twenty minutes while I packed up my desk.
* * *
Move-in day at Vanderbilt was the third Saturday in August, a year and four months after the bow, and it was ninety-six degrees in Nashville with humidity you could have stood a spoon in.
I drove the Buick. Grant followed in the Silverado, with his roommate Luis riding shotgun and the boxes and a mini fridge and a box fan and a rolling cart Mrs. Greer had bought me. Upperclassmen in gold T-shirts swarmed the cars at The Commons with big blue bins on wheels, shouting room numbers.
My mother was waiting by the curb outside my building. She'd driven herself. I'd invited her two Sundays before, at the end of our twenty minutes, quickly, the way you pull off a bandage, and there had been such a long silence on the line that I'd thought the call had dropped, and then she'd said, in a very small voice, "What time?"
She was wearing Grandma Ida's pearls. With a T-shirt and jeans and sneakers, in ninety-six-degree heat. I almost laughed. Then I didn't.
"Can I carry something?" she said.
"You can carry the lamp," I said. "It's the one from Mrs. Greer. Be careful with it."
She carried the lamp up three flights of stairs like it was the Ark of the Covenant.
My room was a double, cinderblock painted cream, with a window that looked out over a courtyard with a magnolia in it. Grant and Luis built my bed loft in eleven minutes, with the efficiency of men who were used to lifting people out of