I was not loud.
I was precise.
There is a particular comfort in numbers. A beam either holds or it doesn’t. No ambiguity. No you understand, honey. No favoritism. Steel doesn’t care if you’re the right daughter or the wrong one. It cares about yield strength and cross-sectional area and whether you did the math correctly.
I always did the math correctly.
Graduated 2019, summa cum laude. No one came. I rented a gown, walked across the stage, shook the dean’s hand, and took a selfie in the parking lot with my cap tilted because I couldn’t get it to sit straight. Then I went to Target and bought a six-inch steel T-square — the good kind, the kind that costs forty dollars and lasts a lifetime — and I held it in the bag on the bus ride home and thought: this is my diploma. The real one. The one I bought for myself.
I called home on holidays. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Mother’s Day. My father’s birthday. My mother would talk about Shelby — Shelby’s pregnancy, Shelby’s new kitchen, the funny thing Levi said at church. I’d listen. Sometimes I’d try to tell her about a project — we were reinforcing a 1920s theater in Silver Lake, beautiful old bones, and I was proud of the solution we’d found — and she’d say that’s nice, honey, the way you say that’s nice to a child showing you a crayon drawing, and then Shelby would call on the other line.
