ditches, and then went to find the dining hall. My mother made the bed. I let her. She made it the way she'd made it when I was little, the top sheet folded down over the comforter in a perfect eight-inch cuff, and when she was done she stood back and smoothed it with both hands, twice.
"Your daddy wanted to come," she said, not looking at me.
"I know."
"He didn't think you'd want him to."
"I invited him," I said. "I told you to tell him."
"I told him." She smoothed the bed a third time. "He's downstairs. In the parking lot. He's been there since nine. He drove up separately. He said he'd wait until you said."
I looked out the window. You couldn't see the lot from there. Only the magnolia.
I went down by myself.
He was standing by his work truck, the new one, the competitor's truck with somebody else's logo on the door, in the far corner of the visitor lot under the one tree that didn't give any shade. He'd gotten thin. His face was burned dark from a year on the lake with nobody's name on his polo but his own. When he saw me coming, he straightened up, and took his hands out of his pockets, and then didn't seem to know what to do with them, and put them back.
"Josephine," he said.
"Hi, Dad."
We stood there. A family went past with a cart full of plastic drawers and a ficus.
"I'm not going to make a speech," he said. "I've done enough of those." He reached into the cab of the truck and took out a folded piece of paper, a sheet of yellow legal pad, and held it out. "Mags Oduya gave me a list. I called her in March. I had to call four times before she'd talk to me. She hung up on me the first two."
I unfolded it. It was in my father's square, all-capitals contractor's handwriting, the handwriting from every dock estimate I'd seen on our kitchen counter my whole life. It was a list of bridges. Sixty-one of them. Every bridge I'd inspected with Mags that year. Name, county, road, year built, and in the last column, the date.
"The date's when I went," he said. "Weekends. I drove out to every one. I don't know what I was looking at. I'm not an engineer. I just stood on them." He cleared his throat. "That old wooden one in Rhea County. I stood on that one an hour. Mags said you took forty pictures of it."