Turn 61 of 233

Head to the site Monday and start prepping for the commercial retrofit. Good thing I live in Florida, I can stay naked all year long because its warm and humid all the time.

Monday morning Lena runs eleven miles in the dark. The body holds. The thighs tremble at mile ten and a half and she leans into it and the trembling converts to heat and she glides through eleven and stops and stands and the blood and sweat run down her legs and the morning sun hits the tribal ink on her belly and she is upright and she is not stopping. She walks home and eats a dozen eggs and two pounds of ground beef and a pot of rice and drives to the site at five-thirty in the dark.

The east side residential project is done. Four houses behind her, walls plumb, headers level, quality confirmed by Walt and Jensen both. The bonus hit her account Friday — three houses, three line items, a number that would have seemed impossible three months ago when she was tugging at waistbands in a bathroom mirror. Now it's just what the work is worth. She stands on the slab of the last house and looks at the four behind her and the sign that reads CREW LEAD: L. PARK and then she turns and looks at the building on the other side of the lot.

The commercial retrofit is a two-story warehouse shell — old brick, high ceilings, exposed beams. The developer wants it converted to mixed retail and office space. Load-bearing walls need to come out and be replaced with steel I-beams. The floor plan needs to be opened up. New electrical, new plumbing, new HVAC runs through a building that was built in the seventies and hasn't been touched since. It's a different animal than residential framing — heavier materials, tighter tolerances, a longer timeline. Lena walks the interior at five-forty in the morning with her bare feet on the cold concrete slab and her flashlight beam cutting through the dust and she's already thinking about sequence. Which walls come down first. Where the temporary shoring goes. How you support a second floor while you cut the ground-floor structure out from under it.

Walt arrives at six-fifteen and finds her in the warehouse with a clipboard she found on a shelf, sketching the demolition sequence in pencil on the back of a requisition form. He stands in the doorway and watches her for a moment — naked, 245 pounds, six-three, belly tattooed, feet filthy, bent over the clipboard with the flashlight between her teeth — and he says, "You've been here an hour."

"Forty minutes," Lena says around the flashlight. She pulls it out of her mouth.

"Walt. The second floor. If we pull the east wall on the ground level, what's carrying the load above?"

"Steel column. We set it before we cut."

"I know. I mean where does it sit relative to the existing joists. If it's off-center we're shimming and shimming on a steel column is —"

"A pain in the ass," Walt finishes. He walks in and takes the clipboard from her and looks at the sketch. He studies it for ten seconds and looks up at her.

"You've got the sequence right. But you're missing the temporary shoring on the north side. Soil report says the footer is shallow there. You cut the wall before you shore and the whole north end shifts."

Lena takes the clipboard back and adds the shoring line and Walt nods. The crew arrives at seven — Marco, Daryl, Ray, Frank, Tuki — and they stand in the warehouse and look up at the two-story ceiling and the exposed beams and the brick walls that have to come down and Lena hands Walt the clipboard and says, "Morning meeting. Five minutes. I need everyone on the slab."

The Florida morning is already warm and humid and the air inside the warehouse is thick and still and the sweat starts on Lena's skin before she finishes talking. She doesn't mind. She never minds anymore. The heat is just another thing the body metabolizes — another input, another fuel. She stands naked in front of the crew with the clipboard in her hand and the tribal tattoo on her belly and the steel barbells catching the light and the grime layered on her skin from weeks of work and she lays out the sequence. Demo starts Monday. East wall first. Temporary shoring north side before any cuts. Steel delivery Wednesday. She talks and the crew listens and Marco asks about the HVAC runs and Daryl asks about the plumbing timeline and Lena answers and the morning moves and the work begins.