Turn 38 of 233

Call Mom and Dad for the weekly check-in while cooking dinner naked. Then I run 4 miles at dawn and see what my body does past its last limit. Then I go out and celebrate with a massive breakfast somewhere public, still naked, tanned, sweaty and disgusting

Lena stands in her kitchen with the phone wedged between her ear and shoulder, naked, chopping onions on the cutting board with a chef's knife she found at the thrift store two weeks ago. The cast-iron pan is heating on the burner behind her and the rice cooker is clicking and the apartment smells like garlic and sesame oil and the particular warm musk of her own unwashed skin. She is cooking pork belly — a thick slab she picked up from the butcher on the way home, four pounds of it, scored and salted and going into the pan fat-side down. Her belly presses against the counter edge as she works and the phone is warm against her ear and Janet picks up on the second ring.

"Hi, Mom," Lena says. She drops the onions into the pan and they hiss.

"I'm cooking. Hold on."

"You're cooking what?" Janet says. There is the sound of a television in the background — Samuel's news program, the low murmur of a anchor reading headlines — and Janet's voice has the careful brightness of a woman who has been waiting by the phone.

"Pork belly," Lena says. "Four pounds. I ran four miles this morning and I'm starving."

There is a pause. Janet processing the number.

"Four miles," she says. "Barefoot?"

"Barefoot," Lena says. She flips the pork belly with tongs and the fat renders and pops and the smoke rises and her belly catches the heat from the stove.

"My feet are fine, Mom. The calluses are like leather now."

Janet is quiet for a moment. In the background Lena hears Samuel's voice — not to her, to Janet, something low and brief — and Janet says, "Your father wants to know if the roof held."

"The roof held," Lena says. "Walt put me on the next two houses. Crew lead. My name's going on the site sign."

She hears Samuel say something else and Janet covers the phone and there is a muffled exchange — not arguing, the particular back-and-forth of two people who have been married for thirty years and can conduct an entire negotiation in tone alone — and Janet comes back and says, "He says congratulations. He won't say it himself because he's watching the news but he says it."

Lena laughs. The laugh is deep and full and it shakes her belly against the counter and she stirs the onions and says, "Tell him thanks. And tell him the trusses were set in six hours. He'll know what that means."

"Six hours," Janet repeats, and there is a second pause, and then she says, "He's nodding. He's not smiling but he's nodding."

They talk for ten more minutes. Janet asks about the pork belly recipe and Lena describes it — the scoring, the salt, the render, the braise — and Janet says, "Your grandmother used to make pork belly like that," and Lena says, "I know. I remembered it last week." They talk about the weather and the Angels and Janet's garden and Samuel's back and the fact that Lena's cousin David is getting married in October and Janet doesn't ask if Lena is coming because she has learned not to ask questions that have answers she isn't ready for. When they hang up Janet says, "I love you," and Lena says, "I love you too, Mom," and the phone goes dark and Lena drops the pork belly into the braise and covers the pan and eats the rice standing at the counter with her fingers, too hungry to wait.

Dawn. Four-thirty. The alarm is the light — Lena doesn't use a clock anymore, her body wakes her when the sky goes gray. She steps out of the apartment barefoot and naked and the concrete is cold and damp with dew and her feet leave dark prints on the sidewalk as she starts. The first three miles are the new normal. Her stride is long and low and her bare feet find the pavement with the ball-landing gait that has become automatic, her toes gripping, her calves absorbing, her belly swaying in its heavy rhythm. Her breath is steady. Her thighs drive. The city is empty and the air is cool and the light comes up around her like something being slowly poured.

Mile four is where the wall lives. She felt it at three last week — the burn in her calves, the friction-warmth in her soles, the rawness in her lungs. This time the wall comes later and harder. Somewhere past the park, past the empty bus stop, past the closed car wash with its flapping banners, her body starts to negotiate. Her thighs go heavy. Her breath goes ragged. The sweat pours off her in sheets — down her chest, down the channel of her belly, into the creases of her hips, down her legs to her ankles and onto her feet where it mixes with the street dirt and turns to mud between her toes. Her feet are black. Her belly is tight and cramping with the effort and her shoulders are burning and her form has broken down into something ugly and animal — a lurching, grinding, graceless forward motion that is not running so much as refusing to stop. She finishes the fourth mile at a walk, bent over, hands on knees, bile rising in her throat, and she spits onto the sidewalk and straightens up and her legs are shaking and her lungs are on fire and her feet are throbbing and she is grinning.

She walks the last two blocks home and her body is a wreck — sweat-soaked, dirt-caked, trembling with exhaustion, her belly distended with the effort of breathing hard. She doesn't shower. She doesn't even sit down. She grabs her keys and walks out the front door and drives to the diner on Fifth Street — the one with the sticky menus and the cook who works the flat top with a cigarette behind his ear — and she walks in barefoot and naked and tanned and sweaty and filthy and sits at the counter and the whole room goes still.

"Coffee," she says. "Orange juice. Pancakes — a full stack, no, two stacks. Bacon, a pound of it. Sausage, six links. Hash browns, extra crispy. And two eggs over easy on top of the hash browns."

The waitress is a woman in her fifties named Donna who has seen everything and is surprised by nothing and she writes it all down without looking up and says, "You want butter on the pancakes?"

"A lot of butter," Lena says.

The food comes in waves. The pancakes first — two stacks, twelve pancakes total, golden and dripping with butter and syrup. Lena eats them with her hands, tearing them into pieces and shoving them into her mouth, the syrup running down her wrists and forearms and dripping onto her golden belly. The bacon comes on a separate plate — a full pound, crisp and greasy — and she eats it in strips, three at a time, the grease smearing across her chin. She belches into the middle of the third strip, a deep wet sound that rolls through the diner like a foghorn, and the man two stools down looks at her and looks away and Donna refills her coffee without being asked.

The hash browns come with the eggs on top and Lena eats them with a fork — the only utensil she uses — and the yolk breaks and runs golden across the crispy potatoes and she shovels them into her mouth and her cheeks are full and her belly is pressing against the counter edge and she can feel the food accumulating inside her, layer by layer, the pancakes expanding and the bacon settling and the hash browns going down heavy and warm. She finishes the sausage in four bites and leans back and lets out a long low fart that rumbles the stool and fills the air with the smell of breakfast grease and pork and the man two stools down gets up and moves to a booth.

"Check," Lena says. She pays in cash, leaves a ten on the counter, and walks out into the morning sun with her belly full and tight and her skin golden and her feet black and her body humming with four miles and two stacks of pancakes and the particular satisfaction of being exactly what she is, in public, without apology, without flinching, without the smallest interest in being anything else.