Turn 110 of 233

Skip to the Gainesville gathering — all of them meeting for the first time at Sina's bungalow. Also Samuel is my father. Stupid pregnancy hormones making me think he's my brother. WTH

The bungalow is smaller than Lena remembers. Or maybe it's fuller. Sina has moved the furniture — the coffee table is gone, the couch pushed against the wall, a folding table set up in the living room with a cloth over it and enough chairs for everyone. The mango tree is heavy with fruit outside and the yard is clean and the toys are stacked in a corner and the house smells like coconut milk and taro and something green and earthy that Lena can't name. The laplap is steaming in the kitchen, wrapped in banana leaves, the smell thick enough to lean against.

Janet arrives first. Lena watches from the bungalow porch as her mother's car pulls up to the curb and Janet steps out and stands on the sidewalk and looks at the house. Janet is wearing a blouse and slacks and low heels and her purse is over her shoulder and she looks like a woman arriving at a meeting she didn't know she was scheduled for. She sees Lena on the porch — barefoot, naked, tattooed, five hundred twenty-five pounds, nine weeks pregnant — and her face does the thing it always does. The calculation. The adjustment. The moment where the woman who raised a daughter in a tidy house in a tidy life processes the fact that her daughter is standing in someone else's yard looking like a building with a pulse. Then Janet walks up the path and says: "You look good, sweetheart," and the words are simple and she means them.

Sina opens the door and the two women look at each other. Sina is six-four and broad and wearing a loose cotton dress and her feet are bare on the tile and Janet is five-six in heels and they are looking at each other across the gap between two families that have no shared history and one shared future. Sina puts out her hand. Janet takes it. The handshake lasts two seconds longer than a formal handshake should and Lena watches her mother's face and sees the moment Janet understands who Sina is — the sister of the man her daughter was seeing, the aunt of the baby, the family — and something in Janet's posture shifts. She straightens. She squares. She is meeting family.

Samuel's truck pulls up twenty minutes later. He steps out slow — the way he always steps out, the engineer's assessment of the ground before the weight commits — and he's wearing jeans and a button-down with the sleeves rolled and his boots are clean. He walks up the path and Lena watches him and the pregnancy hormones are doing something to her because the sight of him — her father, the man who said *the work is good* in a parking lot, the man who said *my daughter is going to be a mother* on the phone — makes her throat tight and her eyes hot and she doesn't know if it's the hormones or if it's just that she hasn't seen him in months and he's here. He's here because she asked.

He sees Sina in the doorway and he stops on the path. The two of them look at each other — Samuel, six-one, lean, the engineer's frame, and Sina, six-four, broad, the Samoan frame, the sister of the man who died under a container — and something passes between them that Lena can't read. Sina steps back and opens the door wider and Samuel nods and walks in and the bungalow holds all of them.

The laplap is laid out on the table and Sina cuts it and the banana leaves peel back and the taro is dense and the coconut milk is rich and the smell fills the room. The kids are in the back bedroom — quiet, the way Sina told them to be — and the adults sit around the folding table and the food is passed and the plates are full and Lena eats the way she eats, which is to say she eats more than anyone and doesn't apologize for it and Sina watches her eat and something in Sina's face relaxes, the recognition of something familiar.

Janet asks Sina about Aleki. Not the death — the life. What he was like as a boy, what he liked, whether he was stubborn. Sina tells a story about Aleki at twelve years old carrying a whole piano up the front steps because their mother said she couldn't afford movers and Aleki heard and didn't ask and just did it. Samuel listens and his face is open — not the controlled face, not the engineered face, the real one, the one Lena hasn't seen since she was small, the one that laughs at things before it remembers to be careful.

Lena sits between her parents and the woman who is her baby's aunt and the food is good and the room is small and the baby is nine weeks old and the baby is the reason all of them are in this room and the baby doesn't know it yet. Janet puts her hand on Lena's arm — the tattooed arm, the grime, the tribal ink — and leaves it there. Samuel reaches across the table for a second piece of laplap and his hand brushes Sina's and neither of them pulls back. The mango tree throws shadows through the window and the fan turns and the laplap is warm and the room is warm and the warm thing in Lena's chest is not the wish. It was never the wish.