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Adjust the workout routine based on Dr. Parekh's guidelines — find grass for running, drop the barbell weight plan and go to the site monday and tell the crew the new lifting limits. Ask Sina if she has any family advice. Eat 20,000 calories a day

Sunday afternoon Lena walks the three blocks to the park on Delancey. The grass is thick and flat and freshly mowed — a municipal field, used for soccer practice on weekdays, empty now. She takes off from the far end and runs. The first mile feels different immediately. The impact that concrete sends up through her heels and into her knees and hips is gone — absorbed, softened, the grass taking the force and giving back nothing but green smell and the wet earth under her soles. Her feet sink half an inch with each stride and the stride shortens and the pace drops and her body adjusts the way it always adjusts — finding the new surface, reading it, calibrating. She runs five miles and stops and her feet are clean for the first time in a year. Not dirty, not bleeding, not cracked. Green-stained and soft. She stands in the field and breathes and the baby is thirteen weeks old and the grass is holding her.

On the balcony she re-racks the barbell. Five hundred pounds sits on the Olympic plates like a promise and Lena looks at it the way she looks at a load she can't carry yet — not with regret, with planning. Week twenty is seven weeks away. Seven weeks of five hundred, then the drop. She loads three-fifty on the secondary bar and presses it and the press is easy — too easy, the weight barely registering — but the bracing is different. She isolates the core pressure. Feels where it goes. The belly is a wall and the pressure pushes against it and she backs off before the push becomes a shove. Three-fifty. Not five hundred. The body can do more. The baby says less. The baby wins.

Monday morning she tells the crew. Walt is at the site sign with his thermos and his cap and the others are stretching and Lena stands in the circle and says it plain.

"Doctor's orders. After week twenty I drop my lifting to three-fifty. Construction work stays but I watch the heavy carries. If I need a beam moved, I'll ask."

"You're going to ask," Marco says. "You. Ask."

"I'll ask."

The crew is quiet for a second — the silence of men processing the fact that their invincible lead is voluntarily setting limits — and then Walt nods and says "Good. Family's structure. You need it more now," and the circle breaks and the work begins and the fifth house is waiting.

That night she calls Sina. The phone rings twice and Sina picks up and the bungalow is loud behind her — the kids, the television, the ordinary noise of a house with three children in it.

"I have a question," Lena says. "Family advice. You raised three. What do I need to know?"

Sina is quiet for a moment. The noise dims — she's moved to another room, the bedroom maybe, the quiet room.

"You don't need advice," Sina says. "You need rest. You need food. You need to let the people who love you carry things for you sometimes. The baby will tell you everything else. The baby always tells you."

"What if I don't listen?"

"You'll listen. You're Aleki's. He always listened. He just pretended he didn't."

Lena eats twenty thousand calories. Two whole chickens roasted in the oven, skin crackling, meat falling off the bone. Three pounds of rice in the big pot, salted heavy. A flat of eggs — twelve — scrambled in butter. A bag of donuts, chocolate glazed, twelve of them, gone in twenty minutes. A quart of whole milk, a box of protein bars, a bag of trail mix, two cans of coconut milk. The belch that follows the last chicken is deep enough to vibrate the railing. She lies on the balcony floor and the belly is full and the baby is thirteen weeks old and the food is fuel and the fuel is going somewhere — into the body, into the muscle, into the baby, into the structure that is building itself inside her. The stars are out and the air is warm and the belly is round and she rests one hand on it and the hand is still and the baby is still and everything is exactly where it needs to be.