Turn 107 of 233

Ask Sina about Aleki — what he was like growing up. She also mentions Aleki was the only family she had left, and thanks me for carrying a piece of him

Sina sets the ultrasound on the kitchen counter. She puts the kettle on — the gesture automatic, the kind of hospitality that lives in the hands before the mind decides — and Lena lowers herself onto the couch and the frame groans under the weight and holds. The bungalow is quiet. The kids are at her husband's mother's house for the morning. Sina planned it that way, Lena realizes. She planned the quiet.

"What was he like?" Lena says.

Sina pours two cups and brings them to the coffee table and sits in the chair across from Lena. The tea is dark and sweet and the smell fills the small room. Sina holds her cup with both hands the way Aleki held his beer — the same grip, the same width of fingers, the same way the thumbs overlap.

"He was loud," Sina says. "Everything was loud. The way he ate, the way he laughed, the way he walked through the house. My mother used to say he took up twice the space he needed and she meant it as a complaint but she loved it. He was the one you heard before you saw."

She drinks. The tea steams between her hands.

"He was gentle, though. People saw the size and assumed. But he was the one who carried the kids when they fell asleep in the car. He'd walk them inside and tuck them in and his hands were so big he could hold a whole toddler in one arm. He did that with mine. All three. They called him Uncle Big."

Lena thinks about Aleki on the balcony. The way he lay on the concrete after and didn't ask to stay. The way he ate tuna from the container with his fingers and didn't apologize for any of it. The way he was big and simple and present and didn't complicate things with language. The way he was already gone before she knew she needed to remember him.

"He didn't come home for three years after he started at the port," Sina says. "Not because he didn't want to. Because he was saving. Sending money. Every month, same amount, same day. He didn't call much but the money came. I didn't ask him to. He just did it. That was Aleki. He didn't talk about what he was doing. He just did it and you found out later."

She sets the cup down and looks at Lena and the eyes are Aleki's eyes — the same deep-set brown, the same steadiness — and something in them shifts. Not sadness. Something past sadness. The thing that comes after sadness when you've been sitting with it long enough that it stops being a feeling and becomes a room you live in.

"He was all I had left," Sina says. "Our parents are gone. We don't have anyone else. Just us. Just him and me and the kids. My husband is good but he married into this family, he didn't grow up in it. Aleki was the last one who remembered what our mother's kitchen smelled like. What our father's hands looked like when he came home from work."

Her voice doesn't crack. The steadiness is the Samoan steadiness — the same load-bearing calm that Lena recognized in Aleki, the same calm that held when the container shifted and the rigging failed. Sina holds the grief the way Aleki held the weight. Low. Settled. Close to the ground.

She reaches across the coffee table and puts her hand on Lena's knee. The hand is massive — the same hand as Aleki's, the same thickness, the same warmth — and it rests on the tribal ink and the grime and the bare skin and Lena feels the weight of it.

"Thank you," Sina says. "For carrying a piece of him. I didn't think there would be anything left. I didn't think he left anything behind."

Lena looks at the hand on her knee. The hand is Aleki's hand on a different wrist. The fingers are the same. The grip is the same. And the baby is eight weeks old and growing inside her and the baby is half this family and half her and the family is sitting in a bungalow in Gainesville drinking sweet tea and holding an ultrasound like it's the last photograph of someone who didn't know he was leaving.

"He didn't know," Lena says.

"No," Sina says. "He didn't."

The fan turns. The mango tree throws shadows. The tea cools in the cups and the two women sit in the living room and the ultrasound is on the counter and the baby is growing and neither of them picks it up because it doesn't need to be held. It's already held.