I glance over. “You actually want to hear about it?”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
I look back at the road. “The Meridian contract is a cable-stayed bridge. Crosses the Merced River north of here. It’s been needed for fifteen years, but the project stalled twice because of red tape.” I tap the wheel. “We’re picking it up at the design-development stage, which is where I want to be. You have the most influence over the final outcome at that stage, before everything gets locked in.”
“How long will it take?”
“Design and engineering, maybe eighteen months. Construction’s another two to three years after that.”
She’s quiet for a second. “And you have to think about the physics of that. Something that has to hold all that weight, in weather, for decades.”
“Longer than decades if we do it right. The goal is a hundred-year lifespan, minimum.”
“How do you even—” She stops. “Where do you start? When you’re imagining something that big, where does the brain go first?”
I think about it. I think about how a project begins as a set of problems to be managed. “The span. The distance youneed to cross sets almost everything else. Then the deck load—how much traffic, what kind, what the worst-case scenario looks like. Then you work backward from the forces. What does the structure need to resist? Wind, seismic activity, thermal expansion, dynamic load. Every decision is about managing forces.”
“Seismic activity,” she says. “Right. California.”
“Every structure here has to be designed with it. You build redundancy into the system so that if one element fails, the load transfers to others. The bridge doesn’t go down because of one point of failure.”
She’s nodding, but I can’t tell if I’ve lost her yet. This is usually around the point where people start doing the polite listening face.
“The cables on a cable-stayed design do the work the deck would have to do on its own,” I continue. “They carry the tension load directly to the towers. It’s efficient, it’s elegant when you get it right, and the construction is faster than a suspension design because you don’t need the main cables in place before—”
I catch her smiling out of the corner of my eye. Her eyes are narrowed, and her mouth is tipped upward. It’s that face she makes when she’s thinking something and trying not to say it.
“What?” I ask.
“You’re such a nerd,” she teases.
“You asked where the brain goes.”
“Again, such a nerd.”
I face the road. “Sure thing, violin girl.”
She points at me, ready to argue, but then she sags. “Okay, that’s fair. That is completely fair.”
“Speaking of which,” I say. “What’s the deal with that?”
She doesn’t answer immediately.
“Your music,” I continue. “When I was away, Noah mentioned something new you were doing every few months. I read the article.”
The article ran in theLos Angeles Timesabout two and a half years ago. A profile on emerging soloists. Piper was the opener—three columns with a photograph of her mid-performance, bow up, eyes closed. The journalist described her playing as both technically precise and emotionally unguarded. I read it on a construction site in Seattle and texted Noah to tell her it was good. Noah replied:Tell her yourself.I never did.
“They spelled my name wrong,” she says.
“They spelled your name correctly.”
“In the caption on the photo.Piper Callhan.No second A.”
“Still counts as the article.”
She pulls her feet off the dash and sits up straighter.
“I don’t know where I stand with it anymore,” she says. “I miss it like missing a limb. When I don’t play for a long time, I feel it in my body, like something’s switched off.”
