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plan future visits. Monthly until the due date

Sina gets up to check the laplap and the boy's hand is still on Lena's knee and the girl on the floor is watching Lena eat a third piece and the three-year-old has fallen asleep in Sina's chair. Janet pulls her phone out. The gesture is automatic — the notebook woman, the list maker, the person who turns the shapeless future into something with dates and times and a column for notes. She looks across the table at Sina and says: "We should do this again."

Sina comes back from the kitchen and hears it and nods.

"Monthly. Same as now. I'll cook."

"Every month until January," Janet says. She's already tapping the calendar app, the dates forming as she speaks.

"June, July, August, September, October, November, December. Seven visits. We can adjust if the doctor changes the date."

"January fourteenth," Lena says. "Dr. Parekh confirmed it."

Janet types it. The phone is in one hand and her other hand is on the table and the fingernails are manicured and the laplap is on her plate and she has eaten two pieces and is considering a third. Lena watches her mother coordinate the future of a family that didn't exist three months ago — her family, Aleki's family, the family the baby is pulling into shape around itself like a wall being framed around a single beam.

Samuel clears his throat. "I can make the drive."

"Every month?" Janet says.

"Every month."

He says it the way he said *the work is good* — measured, load-tested, the words carrying exactly what they can hold and no more. But his eyes are on the boy at Lena's knee and the boy hasn't moved and Samuel's face is doing the thing it does when the engineering fails and the structure holds anyway.

Sina writes her address on a piece of paper and slides it across the table to Janet. Janet takes it and puts it in her purse and the address is now in a purse in a bungalow in Gainesville and the address is a fixed point. The boy finally lifts his hand from Lena's knee and goes to the window and the mango tree is heavy outside and the light through the glass is gold and thick. Lena's belly is full of laplap and the baby is nine weeks old and there are seven visits between now and January and seven visits is a schedule and a schedule is a structure and the structure is holding.