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Vessik reads upside down. She has always read upside down. So I folded it, and I put a jar of pencils on it, and she moved the jar of pencils, and she did not unfold the paper, and neither of us has mentioned any of that.

Forty-one thousand, one hundred and change. Roof, sheathing, and the sill on the north side, which has gone soft under the kitchen window where the water has been coming in for longer than anyone has admitted.

There are four buckets in the upstairs hall. In hard rain there are six.

"Ghorlan? Ghorlan, sorry, one more time from the top."

The man with the camera has said this five times. He is a decent size for a human, which is to say he comes up to my sternum, and he has been backing up since we started because he set his tripod for somebody else.

"You want the same answer," I say.

"The same answer, but bigger. Like you're telling a friend."

I would not tell a friend any of this. A friend would already have it.

"Ask it again."

He checks his card. "What does winning this show mean to you?"

"A roof."

The card comes down. He waits. I wait. This is where people usually put more words, and I have never understood the mechanism by which more words improve a true sentence.

"Okay," he says. "So, expand on that? Like, whose roof, why, what happens if you don't get it. Paint us the picture."

"My grandmother's house has water coming through the second floor. The sill under the kitchen window has rot in it. If the sill goes, the wall goes, and then it stops being a roof job."

"Great, great, and what does that do to you?"

"Late."

He rubs his eye with the back of his wrist. Behind him, the woman in the charcoal blazer has stopped in the doorway with a tablet against her hip, and she is looking at me the way a lumber buyer looks at a stack.

"Let's try energy," the camera man says. "Same words, more energy. Like you're excited to be here."

"I am not excited to be here. I am here to work."

"Right, but for the camera."

"For the camera I would have to be excited to be here."

He laughs, and it comes out wrong, and he apologizes for it, which people do around me, and which I stopped correcting when I was about nineteen.

Here is the thing nobody in this building will believe, so I have stopped offering it. I am not being difficult. I am being accurate. Accuracy takes fewer takes.

They asked me eleven questions this morning. My longest answer was nine words. A young man with a headset wrote something on a legal pad after the sixth one and turned the pad face down on his knee, and I have been in enough rooms to understand a pad turned face down.

In the corridor between the conference room and the gear table there is an elevator, and a woman waiting at it, and when the doors open she looks at the car, and then at me, and then says, brightly, "Oh, I'll get the next one, I'm only going down."

The stairs are directly behind her. She takes them.

This is ordinary. I want that understood, because people who get told about it later always want it to be a wound, and it is closer to weather. You adjust for weather. You do not resent it.

The adjustments are these. Stand out of doorways. Keep your hands where they can be inventoried. Go down stairs slowly, because a big man descending fast reads as an event. Sit whenever there is a chair. Speak at the volume of the room and never above it. Let the small person finish the sentence even when the sentence has gone wrong.

I have done all of that since I was fourteen and reached six foot four in a single school year, and it has not, in all that time, occurred to me as a thing I might stop.

The gear table has a monitor propped against a road case, running the morning's interview bites for somebody in the edit tent to log. The picture is a woman on a stool in front of a purple backdrop. Small, freckled, hands set flat on her knees.