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Drive to Gainesville this weekend and bring the ultrasound to the kids. Skip to 28 weeks prenatal visit

The drive to Gainesville is two hours of highway and the ultrasound is on the passenger seat and Lena eats a gas station breakfast — two breakfast burritos and a quart of chocolate milk — and the belly is heavy against the steering wheel now. Not the soft heaviness of fat. The firm heaviness of the baby, sitting low, pressing outward. At twenty weeks the bump is visible even through her mass. People look. She doesn't care.

The bungalow door is open when she arrives. The boy is on the porch with the glove. He has been on the porch with the glove every day since Sina told him. Lena sees him through the windshield and he sees the truck and he is off the porch and at the door before she has the keys out.

Lena holds up the ultrasound. The boy takes it with both hands. He studies it the way a man studies a blueprint — serious, focused, the seven-year-old concentration that is more thorough than anything an adult can produce. The ten-year-old girl looks over his shoulder. The three-year-old is at Sina's hip, watching.

"That's his head," the boy says. "That's his spine. Those are his hands."

"Those are his hands," Lena says.

"He's going to be big."

"He's going to be tall."

The boy nods. He holds the ultrasound against his chest the way he holds the glove — with ownership, with future. Sina watches from the door and her face is the face of a woman watching her son claim a cousin.

"Can I keep this?" the boy says.

"I'll bring you a new one every month," Lena says.

The laplap is steaming and Janet is at the table and Samuel is by the window and the visit is the visit — warm, full, the small room holding everyone. The boy sits next to Lena for the whole meal with the ultrasound propped against his water glass. Samuel looks at it and says nothing and his face is the open face. Janet holds Lena's hand under the table. The structure holds.

Eight weeks pass. The belly changes everything. The bump is prominent now — a taut, round dome that sits high on her torso, pushing the tribal ink outward until the patterns stretch and distort. The baby kicks. Not flutters — kicks. Real ones, visible through the skin, the foot or the elbow pressing out and then retracting. Lena is working on the seventh house and the crew watches her belly move during lunch. Marco stares. Frank pretends not to. Walt says nothing and brings her water. The running has dropped to fifteen miles on Fridays — grass, not concrete — and the three-fifty bench press feels like breathing. The body is doing two jobs and both jobs are growing.

The twenty-eight-week appointment is on a Tuesday. Dr. Parekh's clinic. The fish tank. The reinforced table. The nurse weighs her — five hundred forty-one pounds, fourteen pounds in eight weeks — and the blood pressure is one-twenty-four over seventy-six and Dr. Parekh nods. The ultrasound wand is warm this time — someone remembered — and the screen lights up and the baby is there, bigger, fatter, the skull solid, the spine straight, the legs kicking. The heartbeat is one-forty-two. Strong and steady.

"Twenty-eight weeks," Dr. Parekh says. "Everything is excellent. Growth is at the fifty-eighth percentile. Blood pressure is better than your baseline. You're healthier pregnant than most women are not pregnant."

"The running?"

"Fifteen miles on grass. You're doing it. Keep it. The lifting?"

"Three-fifty. Construction work."

"Keep it. The baby is telling you what he needs and you're listening. Third trimester starts now. The weight will accelerate. The belly will get heavier. You'll feel him drop around week thirty-six. Braxton Hicks will start. They're normal. They're practice."

Lena looks at the screen. The boy is twenty-eight weeks old and he is fat and healthy and his heart is beating at one-forty-two and the structure holds and the structure is growing and January is twelve weeks away.