We walked to the shop. Shawn shuffled around for a few minutes, then emerged with a handful of steel screws. We walked back to the house and he installed the lock, humming to himself and smiling, flashing his baby teeth.
In October Dad won a contract to build industrial granaries in Malad City, the dusty farm town on the other side of Buck’s Peak. It was a big job for a small outfit—the crew was just Dad, Shawn, Luke, and Audrey’s husband, Benjamin—but Shawn was a good foreman, and with him in charge Dad had acquired a reputation for fast, reliable work.
Shawn wouldn’t let Dad take shortcuts. Half the time I passed the shop, I’d hear the two of them shouting at each other, Dad saying Shawn was wasting time, Shawn screaming that Dad had damned near taken someone’s head off.
Shawn worked long days cleaning, cutting and welding the raw materials for the granaries, and once construction began he was usually on-site in Malad. When he and Dad came home, hours after sunset, they were nearly always cussing. Shawn wanted to professionalize the operation, to invest the profits from the Malad job in new equipment; Dad wanted things to stay the same. Shawn said Dad didn’t understand that construction was more competitive than scrapping, and that if they wanted to land real contracts, they needed to spend real money on real equipment—specifically, a new welder and a man lift with a basket.
“We can’t keep using a forklift and an old cheese pallet,” Shawn said. “It looks like shit, and it’s dangerous besides.”
Dad laughed out loud at the idea of a man basket. He’d been using a forklift and pallet for twenty years.
* * *
—
I WORKED LATE MOST NIGHTS. Randy planned to take a big road trip to find new accounts, and he’d asked me to manage the business while he was gone. He taught me how to use his computer to keep the books, process orders, maintain inventory. It was from Randy that I first heard of the Internet. He showed me how to get online, how to visit a webpage, how to write an email. The day he left, he gave me a cellphone so he could reach me at all hours.
Tyler called one night just as I was getting home from work. He asked if I was studying for the ACT. “I can’t take the test,” I said. “I don’t know any math.”
“You’ve got money,” Tyler said. “Buy books and learn it.”
I said nothing. College was irrelevant to me. I knew how my life would play out: when I was eighteen or nineteen, I would get married. Dad would give me a corner of the farm, and my husband would put a house on it. Mother would teach me about herbs, and also about midwifery, which she’d gone back to now the migraines were less frequent. When I had children, Mother would deliver them, and one day, I supposed, I would be the Midwife. I didn’t see where college fit in.
Tyler seemed to read my thoughts. “You know Sister Sears?” he said. Sister Sears was the church choir director. “How do you think she knows how to lead a choir?”
I’d always admired Sister Sears, and been jealous of her knowledge of music. I’d never thought about how she’d learned it.
“She studied,” Tyler said. “Did you know you can get a degree in music? If you had one, you could give lessons, you could direct the church choir. Even Dad won’t argue with that, not much anyway.”
Mother had recently purchased a trial version of AOL. I’d only ever used the Internet at Randy’s, for work, but after Tyler hung up I turned on our computer and waited for the modem to dial. Tyler had said something about BYU’s webpage. It only took a few minutes to find it. Then the screen was full of pictures—of neat brick buildings the color of sunstone surrounded by emerald trees, of beautiful people walking and laughing, with books tucked under their arms and backpacks slung over their shoulders. It looked like something from a movie. A happy movie.
The next day, I drove forty miles to the nearest bookstore and bought a glossy ACT study guide. I sat on my bed and turned to the mathematics practice test. I scanned the first page. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to solve the equations; I didn’t recognize the symbols. It was the same on the second page, and the third.
I took the test to Mother. “What’s this?” I asked.
“Math,” she said.
“Then where are the numbers?”
“It’s algebra. The letters stand in for numbers.”
“How do I do it?”
Mother fiddled with a pen and paper for several minutes, but she wasn’t able to solve any of the first five equations.
The next day I drove the same forty miles, eighty round-trip, and returned home with a large algebra textbook.
* * *
—
EVERY EVENING, AS THE CREW was leaving Malad, Dad would phone the house so Mother could have dinner waiting when the truck bumped up the hill. I listened for that call, and when it came I would get in Mother’s car and drive away. I didn’t know why. I would go to Worm Creek, where I’d sit in the balcony and watch rehearsals, my feet on the ledge, a math book open in front of me. I hadn’t studied math since long division, and the concepts were unfamiliar. I understood the theory of fractions but struggled to manipulate them, and seeing a decimal on the page made my heart race. Every night for a month I sat in the opera house, in a chair of red velvet, and practiced the most basic operations—how to multiply fractions, how to use a reciprocal, how to add and multiply and divide with decimals—while on the stage, characters recited their lines.
I began to study trigonometry. There was solace in its strange formulas and equations. I was drawn to the Pythagorean theorem and its promise of a universal—the ability to predict the nature of any three points containing a right angle, anywhere, always. What I knew of physics I had learned in the junkyard, where the physical world often seemed unstable, capricious. But here was a principle through which the dimensions of life could be defined, captured. Perhaps reality was not wholly volatile. Perhaps it could be explained, predicted. Perhaps it could be made to make sense.
The misery began when I moved beyond the Pythagorean theorem to sine, cosine and tangent. I couldn’t grasp such abstractions. I could feel the logic in them, could sense their power to bestow order and symmetry, but I couldn’t unlock it. They kept their secrets, becoming a kind of gateway beyond which I believed there was a world of law and reason. But I could not pass through the gate.
Mother said that if I wanted to learn trigonometry, it was her responsibility to teach me. She set aside an evening, and the two of us sat at the kitchen table, scratching at bits of paper and tugging our hair. We spent three hours on a single problem, and every answer we produced was wrong.
“I wasn’t any good at trig in high school,” Mother moaned, slamming the book shut. “And I’ve forgotten what little I knew.”
Dad was in the living room, shuffling through blueprints for the granaries and mumbling to himself. I’d watched him sketch those blueprints, watched him perform the calculations, altering this angle or lengthening that beam. Dad had little formal education in mathematics but it was impossible to doubt his aptitude: somehow I knew that if I put the equation before my father, he would be able to solve it.
When I’d told Dad that I planned to go to college, he’d said a woman’s place was in the home, that I should be learning about herbs—“God’s pharmacy” he’d called it, smiling to himself—so I could take over for Mother. He’d said a lot more, of course, about how I was whoring after man’s knowledge instead of God’s, but still I decided to ask him about trigonometry. Here was a sliver of man’s knowledge I was certain he possessed.