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.”

For the first year, the plan was just survival. Rent. Food. Gas. Tuition. I tracked every dollar on a notepad because I couldn’t afford the mistake of losing track. I bought jeans at thrift stores and work boots from discount racks. I ate a lot of peanut butter and a lot of rice and felt no particular shame about it, because shame requires energy I was putting somewhere else. I said yes to every available shift, including the ones that paid badly and the ones that required being on a job site before sunrise in November, because every shift was money and money was the thing I was trying to accumulate from a starting point of forty-three dollars on a borrowed couch.

I framed houses in winter, patched roofs in early spring when the ice was barely off the shingles, hauled drywall through July heat in houses with no HVAC yet installed, learned which foremen knew what they were talking about and which ones only knew how to perform authority. The distinction mattered. The good foremen taught you how to think. The others just taught you how to perform.