With Robbie slung under one arm or braced against her shoulder, Antonia notices spring flush the city pink and green with a quality of attention she’s never felt before. See this, she tells him, as he mouths along her collarbone, or fans his fingers open and shut. See all there is here?

—

In spring of 1943, Joey signs the papers on a solid, four-story brownstone with a spacious front yard in Carroll Gardens. The war has made him, if not a rich man, a very comfortably situated one. Sofia and Saul and Julia move in to the first floor one frigid day, when the sky dumps snow in wet, sticky clumps which cling to coat collars and congeal in bootlaces and the folds of trousers.

Rosa wastes no time in her new kitchen. Sunday dinner had been too big for her Red Hook apartment for years. She invests in a long, sturdy table that runs like a canyon from one end of her dining room to the other. Even so, dinner has grown so much that folding chairs still have to be squeezed into tight places. Preparation regularly spills into Sofia’s kitchen, where there are always pans of ravioli on the table, waiting to be boiled. Where the fridge is stuffed with twine-sealed bakery boxes and bottles of wine line the baseboard. A fog of tomato and meat floats out the windows of both Rosa’s and Sofia’s apartments. It fills the hallways of their building. It makes its way in fragrant tendrils down the street.

—

Even after Antonia seems to have recovered, Sofia goes to Antonia’s every day all summer. She is relieved the way the family member of anyone who has almost died is relieved: in no small part, what would I have been without you, a selfish and insistent wondering that has not lessened as Sofia observes herself in the mirror and in shop windows. She is stuck inside a disintegrating container. Her face is puffy and tired; her hair comes out in small slithering bunches when she runs her hands through it. She has stuffed herself back into her pre-baby girdles and hose, but her body resents being told how to breathe now. The fear that choked her when she was pregnant has changed; Sofia has developed a certain confidence in her own ability to care for Julia. She sleeps thinking of Julia, and wakes with the slightest hiccup in Julia’s breath. Sofia knows where Julia is the way she knows she has arms; it’s easy. Sofia loves Julia with her belly, with her hands; a hot love like a flame. But Sofia feels herself sinking into invisibility. She wants desperately to pull herself onto an alternate path. She is not the same as she was, and she is not the same as other mothers, and she mourns that, and she wakes hoping to see Antonia’s face each morning. Antonia is a rudder, a root system, a time machine.