Turn 113 of 233

Ask Samuel what he's thinking — his face is open and I want to know what's behind it. Then tell Sina about the construction work and what I'm building. Then end the visit

The boy is at the window and the three-year-old is asleep in Sina's chair and the girl is cross-legged on the floor reading something on a tablet and the table is between all of them and Lena looks at Samuel. His face is the open face. Not the engineered face, not the measured face, the one that calculates the load before speaking. This face is something else. This face is the face of a man watching his daughter sit in a stranger's kitchen with a dead man's sister and a dead man's children and a belly that is his grandchild and the face doesn't know what to do with itself.

"What are you thinking?" Lena says.

Samuel looks at her. The openness doesn't close. She expects it to — expects the walls to come up, the engineering to reassert itself, the careful language to step in and replace whatever is underneath. But it doesn't. He looks at her and his hands are flat on the table and the laplap is cold on his plate and his eyes are wet and he doesn't wipe them.

"I'm thinking about your grandfather," he says. "My father. He was a mason. He built walls with his hands. He came home covered in dust and he never once said he wished he'd done something else. I watched him work when I was the age of that boy at the window. I decided I would be something different. Something cleaner. Something with numbers."

He pauses. The fan turns. The mango tree shadows move across the tile.

"I was wrong," he says. "Not about the numbers. About thinking the numbers were better than the dust."

Lena doesn't say anything. The words sit in the room the way a beam sits on a foundation — you don't move them, you let them hold. Samuel has never said this. In twenty-four years he has never said this. The pregnancy hormones make her eyes hot again and she doesn't fight it. She lets the heat come and lets it sit and doesn't wipe her eyes either.

Later, when Janet is helping Sina clear the plates and Samuel is on the porch looking at the mango tree, Lena tells Sina about the work. The construction. The crew. The way the walls go up and the framing holds and the body knows what to do when the hands are busy. Sina listens the way Sina listens — fully, the Samoan patience, the steadiness — and when Lena describes the third house, the O-line technique, the way she drops her hips and uses her belly as a counterweight, Sina laughs. The laugh is Aleki's laugh. Loud and sudden and full.

"He would have lost his mind," Sina says. "He would have been out there with you. Carrying things. Showing off."

"He would have tried to out-lift me."

"He would have tried. He would have failed. He would have been furious."

The laugh settles between them. Lena folds the ultrasound once more and puts it back in the visor pocket and the bungalow is behind her and the highway is ahead and the drive home is two hours of silence and the silence is full and not empty. She parks at the apartment and the stars are out and the balcony is warm and she lies on the concrete and the baby is nine weeks old and the family is built and the structure is holding and the structure is hers.