"Three and a half."
"Your mother drove like that too." He looked out over the hall. "I'm not asking you for anything. I want you to know I know that."
"I know you're not." She held herself still. "I'm not there yet. With you. I don't know if I'm going to get there."
"That's fair."
"But I want to see the lathe sometime. At Sal's." Her voice was very quiet. "I want to see if I remember how."
He didn't answer. He couldn't. He nodded at the floor, twice, and Jalen, who missed nothing that day, looked politely up at the big screens.
---
The form for Houston came home on a Tuesday in late March. It was three pages this time. Air travel, four nights, a fee that made Renita close her eyes for a second and do the math, and then do it again with the scholarship line item Ms. Sato had circled in green.
Dez put it on the coffee table after dinner. He knelt in his spot with the yellow pencil and filled in every line a kid was allowed to fill in, neat block capitals. Then he looked up. She saw him get ready, like a swimmer on the block.
"Mom—"
"Now," Renita said. She was already setting her tea down on the windowsill. "Ask me now."
She sat on the floor across from him, in her work clothes, and read all three pages while he watched. The city was lit up behind her in the big windows, and she didn't look at it once. Walter stood in the kitchen doorway with the lighthouse towel over his shoulder and pretended to be drying a pot that was already dry. On the couch, Jalen, in his ROC RINGS hoodie and the glued black shoes he'd decided to finish the season in, had his phone in his hand and wasn't looking at it.
She signed her name slowly, every letter, the way her father had once taught her to cut anything that mattered. Measure twice. Then make the cut.
Dez took the paper and looked at the signature for a long moment.
"Thanks," he said. And then, after a moment, quietly, as if he were adding a single line to a program and wasn't yet sure it would compile: "Will you come to Houston?"
"I already asked for the days," she said. "I asked first thing this morning. Before you even brought it home."
He looked at her. He didn't say anything. But he nodded once, exactly the way Ms. Sato did, and went back to his notebook. Renita stayed where she was, on the floor of her own living room, while her family went on around her, and decided that was enough for one night.