Ambruzzo’s involvement with the Spordonza family began with deliveries on his route for the bakery and soon became a full-time after-school job of hustling. Martin was careful to keep the boy’s work within a strict time frame set by Nonna. Ambruzzo’s duties were not to interfere with his studies, force him to miss a meal, or prevent him from tending the bread on Sunday mornings.

Ambruzzo’s grandmother was a practical woman. She had been sent to America by her parents when she was sixteen years old. At night, while she tried to sleep in the small attic room of the family she cleaned for, she had listened to the wind rattle the windows like teeth and imagined the place overflowing with her children and her children’s children. She’d stuff the room with her descendants, contemplate each nose, chin, and earlobe, and think of names—first names, middle names, confirmation names—an endless stream of words to fill the cold, thin, empty air.

Her chance at a family came while she was shopping for bread. The baker was a bachelor, a man who’d lived with his mother—a mother who had died the week before. Nonna gave him one of the sweet sausages she’d just bought at the butcher’s. On the next visit, she offered to wash his shirts. Another month and they were married and she was suddenly full, with a man and a baby and a home. Later, when she laid her husband in the ground and then her daughter, she had to find something to fill up the space: cookies, rolls, and star bread on Sundays. She poured sugar and measured salt.

Nonna watched with a mixture of regret and relief as her grandson left for Spordonza’s each day. She had seen his fate coming in a cup of Earl Grey. The tea had tumbled into her saucer and shown an unnatural equanimity. She had already been witness to his effortless composure: a hand burnt on the oven, a broken arm from a fall off a bicycle, a severe case of chicken pox endured without a whimper. The wet brown leaves tracked across her good china and filled in Ambruzzo’s future.

When he was fifteen Ambruzzo fell in love. Her name was Amy Stackenfrach, a redhead who sat diagonally across from him in his third-period U.S. history class. She had a mole at the base of her neck in the shape of a twisted oval. It looked like a tiny, tiny mouth, and the longer Ambruzzo stared at it, the more he felt the urge to put his finger there.