Turn 18 of 233

Encourage everone to push through the heat. Then relax with the crew once everything is finshed. Accept the drinks invite

The heat keeps building. By one o'clock the temperature gauge in Walt's truck reads ninety-four, and the air on the second floor of the frame is dead and heavy, no breeze reaching the open studs. Ray's hammering slows. Daryl keeps working but his face is flushed dark and the sweat runs off him in sheets. Even Marco goes quiet, which Lena has never seen last more than thirty seconds. Lena feels it too — the sun pressing on her bare shoulders, the sweat pouring down the curve of her belly and the channel between her breasts, dripping off her in a steady stream that darkens the sawdust at her feet — but her body runs hot and steady, the engine inside her burning clean, and she keeps moving.

"Come on, Ray," she says, carrying a stack of shingles up the ladder with her belly brushing each rung. "We're almost through the east wall. Twenty minutes and we're done." Ray grunts and swings his hammer. She passes Daryl on the way down and claps him on the shoulder, hard, the way Walt does.

"Stay with me, big guy. Almost there." Daryl blinks at her and nods and goes back to his stud. She hauls lumber, holds sheets of plywood while Frank measures, drives nails in three strokes, and the crew follows her pace because she sets it and doesn't slow down.

Marco is the one who starts flagging. He's twenty and lean and the heat sits on him differently — he stops mid-swing and leans on his hammer, chest heaving, and Lena walks over and takes the hammer from his hand and sets it down.

"Water break. Two minutes. Then we finish." She hands him the jug from the cooler and he drinks and looks at her like she's something he can't quite figure out, this huge bare-breasted woman standing in the sun without breaking stride, her belly round and wet and heaving, her feet black with dirt and callused hard as boot leather. He drinks. He picks up his hammer. They finish the east wall at two-fifteen, and Walt calls it.

The crew gathers in the shade of the truck tailgate, shirtless and drenched and spent. Tuki produces a cooler from somewhere — not the work cooler, a personal one — and inside are bottles of cheap beer packed in melting ice. He hands them out without ceremony and Lena takes one, twists the cap off with her thumb and the edge of the tailgate, and drinks. The beer is ice-cold and the heat is brutal and the shade feels like mercy. She sits on the tailgate next to Frank, her bare thighs pressing against the warm metal, her belly resting heavy on her lap, her breasts bare and still damp with sweat, and nobody looks at her any differently than they look at each other. Marco talks about the Seahawks' training camp. Daryl and Ray share a bag of chips in their silent twin language. Walt leans against the truck and drinks and says nothing and the nothing is comfortable.

Lena lets out a long, low belch that rattles the empty beer bottle in her hand and Marco whoops.

"That's what I'm talking about," he says, and Tuki laughs — a deep, quiet sound — and Frank shakes his head but his mouth is curved. Lena grins and tips her head back and the sun is on her face and her body is huge and exhausted and strong and she is sitting with these men who don't ask her to be less, drinking warm beer in the shade of a house she helped build, and the thought that drifts through her mind doesn't feel like a wish anymore. It feels like hers. This is the life. This is the one.