They are married by a priest who comes to the Colicchio apartment on a Friday evening and leaves with a thick envelope of cash and less guilt than he would have expected. For a wedding present, Sofia’s parents find them an apartment on Verona Street, situated carefully in the still-Italian area of Red Hook. Suspended on one side several blocks from Hamilton Ave, where the Irish kids who call themselves Creekies still throw punches, rocks, and sometimes knife blades at Italians who get too close, and on the other side, the old docks, where there are too many hollow-eyed desperate families who, Joey understands, would do anything to survive, the apartment is most importantly as far away as Joey can manage from the Red Hook Houses, where every day, it seems, new longshoremen and their families are pouring into the neighborhood like ants. Joey has his sights set on a townhouse in Carroll Gardens: one of the modern ones, with brick walls and new plumbing and a front yard filled with flowers. He imagines Rosa presiding over one end of a long wooden dining table. He can picture Sofia and his grandchildren living on one floor, the sounds of small feet pounding the wood floors and laughter coming up through the radiator pipes. But in the meantime, he finds, for his daughter, a railroad apartment with two bedrooms and a kitchen and a sitting room all in a line.

Saul and Sofia move their things in before they are married so they can sleep there on their first night. Rosa packs them boxes of second-best dishes, the old stockpot with the small dent in it, and when they arrive and the door shuts behind them there is an awkward silence in the apartment until Saul says, wait here, and goes into the kitchen, and comes back with a drinking glass wrapped in a dishtowel. He puts it on the floor before Sofia and tells her to stomp on it. Sofia does not ask questions, but lifts her foot and slams it down, and as the glass crunches it is like a film is peeled back from her eyes. She is giddy. She wants to take the glasses down from the shelves and smash them all.

Chapter 15

Sofia wakes sweating in the night and opens the bedroom window to let the sludgy air move around her like porridge. She turns to watch Saul sleep, the outlines of his face just visible in the gray city night. His brow furrows; words form and fade around the edges of his mouth. And it is now, while she is alone in the way one always is while watching someone else sleep, that something occurs to Sofia, something she has always known, but has never had the words for, or the courage to speak: it is possible she doesn’t want to be a mother.