Turn 25 of 233

Head home early to rest and eat before the next project starts Monday. On Saturday, I get a surprise visitor, my mom Janet.

Lena leaves the site at noon, walking home in the full heat of the day with her bare feet on the hot pavement and her belly full and heavy and proud. The inspection is done. The house is done. She stops at the grocery store and buys a rotisserie chicken, a bag of macaroni and cheese, potato salad, a six-pack of beer, and a chocolate cake from the bakery section — the kind with the thick ganache frosting, dense and dark. She eats the mac and cheese standing at the stove, scooping it from the pot with a spoon, the cheese pulling in long strings. She eats the chicken with her hands, pulling meat off the bone, grease running down her forearms. She eats the potato salad and half the cake and drinks two beers and belches so long and low it rattles the window glass. Her belly is enormous, stretched tight and warm, and 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 give out. She finishes drenched in sweat and lies on the hardwood with her belly rising and the ceiling fan turning slow above her and the feeling of the passed inspection sitting in her chest like something solid and real. She sleeps on the floor again, naked, filthy, content.

Friday she eats leftover chicken and cake for breakfast, exercises for an hour, and spends the afternoon on the couch watching baseball with a bag of chips on her belly and a beer in her hand. She farts and the sound echoes off the cushions and she doesn't move except to reach for more chips. She is resting the way she works — completely, with her whole body committed to it. She eats a frozen pizza for dinner and drinks three beers and falls asleep on the couch with the game still on and the chip bag crinkling under her hip.

Saturday morning she wakes to a knock at the door. Not a polite knock — a firm, rapid, insistent knock, the kind that carries its own urgency. She sits up on the couch, naked, her belly shifting heavy and full, and the knock comes again. She pulls on the tiny shorts — the only clothing she has left that isn't on the floor — and walks to the door barefoot and shirtless and opens it.

Janet Park stands in the hallway. She is five foot four, compact and precise, her hair cut short and neat, her blouse tucked in, her sandals clean. She is carrying a canvas tote bag and a casserole dish covered in foil and her expression is the kind of controlled calm that Lena recognizes from twenty-four years of experience as the surface above something volcanic. Janet looks at her daughter — six foot three, two hundred pounds, barefoot and shirtless, skin golden brown, body hair thick and dark and visible everywhere, belly round and heavy and hanging over the waistband of shorts so small they're barely there, feet callused and black with dirt, hair tangled and unwashed, smelling like sweat and old food and the deep musk of a body that hasn't been cleaned in weeks — and her mouth opens and closes and opens again.

"Lena."

"Mom."

Janet's eyes move down Lena's body and back up. The controlled calm holds for three more seconds and then something shifts behind it — not anger, not yet, but something raw and complicated that Lena can't quite read.

"You haven't been answering your phone," Janet says. "For two weeks. I called the office and they said you don't work there anymore. I drove three hours." She is holding the casserole dish in both arms the way someone holds a shield.

Lena leans against the doorframe, her bare shoulder against the wood, her belly pushing forward, and looks at her mother. The old Lena would have panicked. Would have grabbed a shirt, would have apologized, would have tried to explain. This Lena stands in the door exactly as she is and doesn't move.

"I quit," Lena says. "I got a better job. Construction. I'm a lead laborer at Jensen and Sons."

Janet stares at her. "Construction," she says, and the word comes out flat.

"I'm good at it. We just passed inspection on a house I helped build." Lena says it without pride or defensiveness — just fact, the same way Walt would say it. Janet's eyes drop to Lena's bare breasts and back up and the something behind her expression cracks wider.

"You're not wearing a shirt."

"No."

"Lena, you look —" Janet stops. The casserole dish trembles slightly in her hands. She starts again.

"What happened to you?"