Turn 24 of 233

Go home and eat the biggest dinner I can make before the inspector tomorrow. She is impressed with our work

Lena walks home in the late afternoon heat, her bare feet leaving dusty prints on the sidewalk, the tiny shorts soaked through with sweat and clinging to every curve. She stops at the grocery store and fills the cart — two ribeye steaks, a pound of bacon, a bag of Yukon Gold potatoes, a block of Gruyère, heavy cream, a loaf of sourdough, a bag of frozen green beans, a pint of ice cream, and a six-pack of beer. Jared the cashier scans everything without looking up. She carries the bags home in one trip, the plastic handles cutting into her callused palms, her belly leading the way up the stairs.

She cooks naked at the stove, the kitchen window open to the warm evening air. The ribeyes go into the cast-iron pan with butter and garlic and the smell fills the apartment — charred meat and rendered fat and the deep savory heat of a kitchen that has been used hard and never cleaned. She roasts the potatoes with the Gruyère melted over them, crisps the bacon in the second pan, steams the green beans with butter and salt. She eats standing at the counter, cutting the steak with a knife and eating it in long strips, the juice running down her chin and forearms, the fat rendering on her tongue. She eats both steaks. She eats all the potatoes, scraping the pan with a spoon. She eats the bacon crisp and salty and the green beans and tears the sourdough open and drags it through the steak fat pooled on the cutting board. She drinks three beers and eats the entire pint of ice cream straight from the container with a spoon, standing in the open freezer door, the cold air washing over her naked, sweaty, food-glazed body.

Her belly is enormous — tight and round, pushing outward, the skin stretched taut and warm, the food sitting heavy and dense inside her. She belches and it rolls through the apartment like distant thunder. She drops to the living room floor and works her body — push-ups, squats, deadlifts with the cast-iron pan, plank holds until her arms shake and the sweat drips off her nose onto the hardwood. The fullness of her belly makes every movement harder and she pushes through it, the weight shifting inside her, the muscle firing beneath the fat. She finishes drenched and shaking and lies on the floor with her belly rising and falling and the ceiling fan turning slow above her.

The alarm is her body at five again, pulling her out of a dreamless sleep on the hardwood. She eats six eggs with cheese and salsa, four pieces of toast with peanut butter, a glass of whole milk, and a banana. She belches. She farts. She pulls on the same tiny shorts and walks to the site barefoot and shirtless in the gray predawn light, her belly full and heavy, her body ready.

The inspector arrives at seven sharp — a compact woman in her fifties named Gloria with a clipboard and a tape measure and reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She walks the perimeter of the house without speaking, measuring, checking, running her fingers along the studs the way Lena did yesterday. Lena stands with Walt and watches, her enormous tanned body bare and dusty in the morning sun, and Walt's arms are crossed and his face gives nothing. Gloria checks the window openings. She checks the stud spacing. She checks the square on every corner. She climbs the ladder to the second floor and checks it there, her clipboard tucked under her arm, and when she comes back down she looks at Walt and then at Lena and her expression shifts — not warm, not exactly, but the particular look of a professional recognizing competence.

"This is clean work," Gloria says. She makes a note on her clipboard.

"Stud spacing is dead on. The two corrections on the east wall — who did those?"

"She did," Walt says, and tips his head at Lena.

Gloria looks at Lena — at the bare chest, the huge tanned belly, the tiny shorts, the callused dirty feet, the thick body hair, the sweat — and whatever she sees, she doesn't comment on it. She makes another note.

"Passed. Sign here." Walt signs. Gloria tears off a copy and hands it to him and walks back to her truck without ceremony. The crew is quiet for three seconds and then Marco lets out a whoop and Tuki opens the cooler and Frank almost smiles and Walt closes his clipboard and the house stands behind them, passed and approved, a real thing in the world.