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Go to the first prenatal checkup with Dr. Parekh on Tuesday. Then skip to next month's visit. 6 more to go

Tuesday morning Lena drives to Fourth Street. The clinic is small — a converted house with a handicap ramp and a sign that reads PAREKH FAMILY MEDICINE in blue letters. The waiting room has six chairs and a fish tank and the fish tank is the most active thing in the room. The receptionist weighs her on a floor scale that goes to six hundred and the number is five hundred twenty-seven and she writes it down without comment. Blood pressure is one-twenty-eight over eighty-two. The nurse doesn't flinch at the tattoos or the bare feet or the nakedness or the smell. She is professional and thorough and her hands are quick.

Dr. Parekh is a small woman in her fifties with glasses on a chain and steady hands. She examines Lena on a reinforced table — the clinic has one, the kind built for larger patients — and the ultrasound wand is cold against Lena's belly and the screen is grainy and gray and then the heartbeat fills the room. Fast. A rapid drumming, like a hammer on a framing nail, one-fifty beats per minute. Lena watches the screen and the shape is curved and small and the heart is beating and the heart is the loudest thing in the room.

Everything checks out. Ten weeks now, measuring on schedule, heartbeat strong, Lena's blood work pending. Dr. Parekh asks about diet and Lena says she eats aggressively and Dr. Parekh says good, keep eating, the body knows what it needs. She asks about exercise and Lena says construction work and thirty-mile runs and Dr. Parekh raises an eyebrow and says moderate the running after the second trimester. She asks about the father and Lena says he's dead and Dr. Parekh's face does nothing — the professional stillness, the clinical mask — and she says I'm sorry and means it and moves on. She schedules the next appointment for four weeks out and Lena walks out with a printout of the ultrasound and the heartbeat still in her ears.

June comes and goes. Lena frames the fifth house in three days and starts the sixth. The belly grows. Not visibly yet — not through five hundred pounds of body — but Lena can feel it. A fullness that is different from the fullness of food or muscle or fat. A specific fullness, located, intentional. The body is building something and Lena is the body and the body knows what it's doing.

The second visit is the last Saturday of June. Lena drives the highway north and the farmland is green and the sky is wide and the truck cab smells like the two breakfast burritos she ate at a gas station and the ultrasound printout is in the visor pocket next to the old one. Janet's car is already at the bungalow when Lena arrives. Samuel's truck is behind it. The bungalow door is open and the laplap is steaming.

Sina meets her at the door. The boy is behind her, seven years old, holding a baseball glove. He sees Lena and walks to her and puts his hand on her belly — not her knee this time, her belly — and says: "Is it bigger?"

"Yeah," Lena says. "A little."

"Can I feel it kick?"

"Not yet. Soon."

He nods and walks back inside and Sina watches him go and her face is the face of a woman watching her son become a cousin. Janet is at the table with her phone out and Samuel is sitting in the chair by the window and the mango tree is heavy with fruit and the bungalow is small and full and the laplap is warm and the baby is thirteen weeks old and the heartbeat is one-fifty and the family is built and the structure holds.