Last week, in a fit of spring fever, Maya and I decided that, instead of meeting up for lunch somewhere on Smith Street, we’d walk over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan. “Are you sure you’re up for this?” she asked as we approached the crosswalk near the bridge’s entrance.

“I’m sure,” I said, though I wasn’t. In the last week or so, the pregnancy had begun to weigh on me, literally. It was not just my belly, which seemed to grow hourly, but also my legs, which were swelling to levels heretofore known only to Fred Flintstone. “I have cankles!” I’d reported to my husband this morning. Andy had looked puzzled. “Calves merging into ankles,” I explained. “Cankles.” It was a Citybaby expecting board word.

Walking was supposed to help this condition, which is why I’d proposed the walk the bridge plan. So was drinking water, which is why I was carrying a large bottle of Poland Spring. “Manhattan, here we come,” I said.

What was meant to sound fearless and forging ahead-y came out sounding winded. Maya flashed a look of concern. “Can I at least carry that water for you?”

“Okay,” I said. I was holding enough water in my legs already. “But don’t let me forget to keep drinking.”

“I won’t,” she said, clearly relieved to be of some use.

Soon enough, we were heading westward on the slatted walkway. Whenever I’m on the bridge I think of a friend of ours who had planned to propose to his girlfriend, now wife on the bridge. They had decided to move in together and had signed the lease on a place in Park Slope the week before. Their walk across the bridge was symbolic of their defection to Brooklyn – this was nearly a decade ago, when a move to Brooklyn was still a defection and not a matter of course – so it seemed to him the perfect place and time to pop the proverbial question.

Walking on the bridge with his beloved and a diamond ring in an antique setting, this friend suddenly noticed that the wooden planks had gaps in them, gaps large enough for a diamond ring in an antique setting to slip through if one’s hands were shaky enough to drop it. Sure enough, his hands started shaking. So right then and there, he demanded they turn around. They did, and he got down on bended knee on the safe surface of pavement.

She agreed and later said that when he turned them around so abruptly, she worried it was because he’d had second thoughts about Brooklyn.

As if reading my thoughts, Maya said, “I have some bad news. I may have to move.”

“What?” I said. The direness in her tone scared me. Hallie and Joel, good friends and neighborhood pioneers, were already talking about buying a place in – gulp – Jersey City. We’d just moved into a great new place. Was everyone suddenly leaving Brooklyn?

“Everyone in my building is freaking out,” she explained, referring to the old DUMBO factory in which she lived. “We’re just about the only place left that hasn’t gotten the full-on TriBeCa treatment. And we’re right on the edge of the water there. And they’re putting in that park.”

“Yeah, but don’t they still use the ground level for something industrial?” I asked, recalling the trash smell that wafted through the stairway.

“For now,” she said glumly. “But if the price is high enough, why wouldn’t the owners sell?” She had me there. “And all of us are living there in illegal sublets. We don’t have a leg to stand on. People say there’ve already been a bunch of real estate developers sniffing around.”

I gave her a sympathetic look. “I guess it’s to be expected,” she said. “Once they opened those furniture stores, it was only a matter of time.”

“So where do you think you’ll go?” I said, tentatively, unsure I wanted to hear the answer.

“I don’t know,” she sighed. Though her art had started selling, I knew that Maya really lived off a small trust fund. Unlike Hallie and Joel, her real estate problem would not be financial.

“Do you think you’d go back to Manhattan?” my voice intimating that this move was now the defection.

“Oh, no,” Maya said, wrinkling her nose. Both relieved and amused, I smiled.

“I guess I’ll have to check out Williamsburg,” she said, pulling a face. “But I don’t know. I just love DUMBO so much. Everywhere else seems so … landlocked.”

It was such a Maya thing to say, completely illogical yet making strange sense. I smiled and let out a laugh, which again sounded winded.

“Drink,” she commanded, handing over the water. I stopped and did as I was told, then looked back to check our progress. We were barely a quarter of the way across the bridge. Already, I was verging on exhaustion. Much as I wanted to complete the walk, it seemed a bad idea to go any further. What could be worse than getting stuck halfway between Brooklyn and Manhattan?

“Can we turn around and go to Grimaldi’s?” I asked between gulps of water.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said.

The Brooklyn Chronicles, a work of fiction, appears each Friday. Previous installments are available at www.nysun.com/archive_chronicles.php. The author can be reached at kschwartz@nysun.com.