And so as the quietly rotting carpet of cherry blossoms below their feet is replaced above by waving rafts of lime-green leaves; as New Yorkers throw open their windows and let the life out of their stale winter apartments and begin to drape their courtyards in crisscrossing lines of laundry and the smell of their food and the timbre of their conversations bursts out into the air in waves; as the city begins, again, to feel full, Sofia Colicchio dresses her daughter, whose strong fat thighs and wildly waving arms threaten to burst the seams of any outfit, and together they walk the three blocks to Antonia’s apartment.

A neighborhood can change drastically in just three blocks; so it is that Sofia and Julia walk from the carefully cultivated front gardens and brownstone smiles of historic Carroll Gardens to its shabbier tenement-style outskirts in mere minutes. Antonia and Paolo and Robbie live in an eight-unit redbrick building on Nelson Street. They have one bedroom in the front, the kitchen faces the rear, and there is a narrow second bedroom and a sitting room laid along the inside of the building like roe along the inside of a fish.

Sofia is breathless when she knocks, and sweating from carrying Julia.

“Tonia,” she says, “I brought you a hungry child to feed.” Antonia takes Julia and coos; moves aside to let Sofia in.

“Convenient,” says Antonia, balancing Julia on her hip. “I was just sitting here hoping to feed a baby.” She kisses Julia’s palm. “A filthy baby! What, does your mamma not clean you? What is on these hands?”

Sofia is peeling off her hose, clips flapping against her thighs. She is hopping on one foot. “It’s just mashed carrots, you should have heard her scream when I came at her hands with a washcloth. She needs to eat every two hours these days.” She drops the hose to the floor, where they curl like snakeskins around her discarded shoes, and sighs. “It’s hot already. It seems like yesterday I was sweating and pregnant. Now I’m sweating and a monster.”

“You’re not a monster,” Antonia says automatically as she takes Julia to the kitchen sink to clean her hands. From the bedroom at the front of the house comes a wail, a siren call.

“I’ll get him,” says Sofia. While Antonia runs warm water in the sink and Julia leans in to splash it, Sofia walks the long hallway to the front room, where Robbie has woken up from his nap.

Robbie’s hands are clasped around the wooden slats of his crib and he is pressing his face between them, waiting to be collected. He sniffs and stops crying at the sight of Sofia, sneaking in barefoot, grinning. “Bibi,” she coos. “Has anyone ever not picked you up, when you needed it?” Robbie does not respond but he stretches his arms out to Sofia, throws his head back in warm release.