The wine is a sloshing tablespoon in the bottom of the bottle and the room has darkened around Sofia and Antonia before they hear Paolo’s key in the lock, and then he is there with Saul, flicking the kitchen light on, standing in the quiet evening apartment with two babies who, now that they have napped so late, will never go to bed on time, and two women who are laughing, laughing at something they will not explain. Saul slips out wordlessly to get pizza from Stefano’s around the corner, where the service is abysmal and the hygiene a serious question but the pies are thin and crisp and dripping with cheese. Sofia and Antonia detangle themselves from the bed, from one another, from the dream of every late afternoon. Paolo is in the kitchen now, opening another bottle of wine, a red one an associate of Joey’s gave him, from a family vineyard in the old country, and it was supposed to be saved for a special occasion, but Antonia doesn’t remind him. She and Sofia will watch Paolo and Saul take off their coats and hats, greet their babies. They will accept scratchy kisses on the cheek.

Once in a while, Sofia and Antonia will catch one another’s eye and wink, or grin. For although they are married—married!—it also seems like at any moment Rosa might burst in and tell them to keep it down, to go to bed. Though they are mothers, it is easy, when they are together, for Sofia and Antonia to feel the childlike elasticity that bound them together, that bound them to the wide world. And more often than not, when Sofia and Antonia make eye contact around their husbands, over their children, they both find themselves stifling laughter.

Chapter 19

The first time Saul hurts someone, his daughter is two years old. Saul and Joey spend the evening in the back room of a bar near the Red Hook Houses. Joey has not told Saul why they are going, but has given him a length of iron pipe to lay against his thigh. I don’t want to hurt anyone, Saul says. I never want to hurt anyone, Joey replies. The room is thick with cigar smoke and the smell of pomade, and a woman with cherries for lips brings Saul glass after glass of whiskey, which he tries to drink slowly or not at all but which, more often than not, he finds himself bringing to his lips to satisfy his restless need to do something, his worry that everyone in the room can hear the pounding of his heart, the clanking of the pipe he has concealed against his bones.