I watched my father throw my clothes, my books, and the last photo of my mother into the fire like my life meant nothing. Then he looked at me and said, “This is what happens when you disobey me.” I said nothing. Six years later, I called him and whispered, “Check your mailbox.”

At night I studied. The trade program was three evenings a week plus Saturday mornings, held in a converted warehouse space near the Franklinton neighborhood with folding tables and a projector screen and instructors who had thirty collective years of field experience between them. We covered estimating, job-site safety, project scheduling, contract basics, and the particular math involved in reading a blueprint and turning it into a material list. I had no background in any of it except the roofing summers, and the roofing had taught me only the physical parts — how to load a nail gun, how to move safely on a pitched surface, how to read the weather when it was relevant. The business side was entirely new.

I learned it quickly because I had no other speed available to me. When you have nothing to fall back on, you learn differently than people who can afford to review the material at their own pace. Every piece of information was a tool I might need sooner than expected. I treated it that way.