Uncle Paulie looked back at the house and stared at it silently for a while. “You said you wanted to know what happened between your mother and your grandmother,” he said at last. “You've got to go back further than them. It started with my mother. Whenever I think of them; Mama—her name was Mifalda—Lu, and Rose, it's like they're standing in a line. Three young girls, handing down all the good and the bad from one generation to the next. They couldn't get away from each other—and I know there were times when they all wanted to. But if you want to go back to the beginning of the story, you gotta start with Mama.”

Chapter 7 - New Haven Connecticut 1936

THE AIR IN the kitchen was hot and thick. It was Monday—washing day. The day of the week that Mifalda hated the most. She straightened up and stretched her aching back—she had a new washing machine, but she still had to bend over the deep sink full of scalding water and bleach and scrub out the stains and spots with her washboard before she could put the laundry into the machine. That was a little detail the advertisements in the newspaper didn't mention. With six kids—five of them boys—there were a lot of stains and spots.

The small space that served as her laundry room was right off the kitchen. There was no ventilation, and the steam from the washing machine mixed with the smell of bleach and made it hard to breathe. Mifalda turned to the woman working at her side. After she'd had her fourth son, her husband, Carmine, had said she had to have a girl to help her in the house. He had hired Ana, a green-horn, whose family came from Poland and had been in America for only a short time. At first, Mifalda had begged Carmine to get someone who spoke Italian so she could speak the language she still missed. But Ana came cheap, and although Carmine spoiled his young wife—his mother said so until the day she died—he was no fool when it came to money.

In the end, Mifalda had come to like the Polish greenhorn. Ana was Mifalda's age, which meant they had things in common, and since Mifalda had been in the country so much longer than Ana—she'd been a citizen for fourteen years by then—she was able to give Ana little tips on being an American when they took a break from their work every afternoon to have coffee. It was nice, she discovered, to be an old-timer. Plus, Ana did all the hardest chores without complaining.