Turn 28 of 233

Spend Sunday evening cooking a massive meal to fuel the first day on the new site. Then show up at dawn on Monday, wearing the same tiny shorts as Thursday and get to work. Skip to next Saturday. My father, Samuel Park is here, and he is not happy. He is as tall as me, but fit and composed and he does not like my changes in life. Mom tried to stop/convince him otherwise, to no success

Sunday evening Lena stands naked at the stove with every burner going. She boils a full pound of pasta and tosses it in a jar of Alfredo sauce and a stick of butter. She browns two pounds of ground beef with onions and garlic and layers it into a casserole dish with the pasta and a bag of shredded mozzarella and bakes it until the cheese bubbles and the edges go crisp and dark. She makes garlic bread from the sourdough loaf, slathered in butter, and eats the whole meal standing at the counter, the casserole dense and heavy in her belly, the bread greasy and warm. She eats the leftovers cold from the dish before bed, scraping the mozzarella off the side with her fingers, and drops to the floor for her workout, the food sloshing inside her as she pushes through push-ups and squats and planks. She sleeps on the hardwood with her belly rising and the kitchen still smelling like garlic.

Monday morning she is at the site at five-forty, barefoot and shirtless in the tiny shorts, the sky still dark. The east side lot is a raw dirt square with a concrete foundation already poured and nothing on it — no framing, no walls, just the flat gray pad waiting. Lena walks the perimeter, checks the foundation measurements against the prints Walt left in the job box, and starts unloading lumber from the delivery pile, carrying the two-by-tens across the lot on her shoulder, her belly swaying with each step, the morning air cool on her bare chest. The crew arrives at seven and Walt looks at the lumber stacked and ready and at Lena already dusty and says nothing, just pulls on his gloves. Marco says something about the Mariners and Tuki hands Lena a breakfast burrito from the cooler and she eats it in four bites while setting up the sawhorses. The week builds itself around her — walls going up, plywood going on, the house rising out of the dirt the way they always do, one stud and one sheet at a time.

By Saturday the first east side house is framed and sheeted and Lena's tan has deepened another shade — the golden brown now creeping lower on her belly where the tiny shorts ride up, the lines sharp where the fabric blocks the sun. She walks home Saturday afternoon expecting the usual — food, floor, sleep — and when she opens the door Samuel Park is standing in the middle of her living room.

He is her height exactly — six foot three — but where Lena is soft and round and bare and filthy, Samuel is lean and composed and pressed. He wears khakis and a clean polo shirt tucked in, his shoes shined, his hair cut short and precise, his posture the rigid architecture of a man who has held himself in place for decades through discipline and quiet disapproval. His face is the face Lena sees in her own mirror sometimes — the same jaw, the same brow — but his is set in an expression she knows the way she knows the back of her hand: the look of a man who has arrived at a conclusion and will not be moved from it.

Janet stands behind him by the door, her purse clutched to her chest, her face tight with the particular exhaustion of a woman who has argued for three hours in a car and lost. She catches Lena's eyes and the look she gives is apology and warning at once.

Samuel looks at his daughter. He takes in the bare chest, the huge tanned belly, the tiny shorts, the body hair, the dirty callused feet, the smell, the whole landscape of what Lena has become. His jaw works once.

"What the hell happened to you."