Julia and Robbie are slack-faced and sound asleep under a thin white rain of cherry blossoms. More pressing than war, today, is the fact that Sofia was supposed to pick up Julia an hour ago. She had exploded into Antonia’s living room earlier, all smiles and laden with supplies for Julia, dripping with diapers and a change of clothes and promising, promising to be back by lunch, just for a few hours, Tonia, I’ve just got to get some air, you know? And Antonia had scooped Julia into her arms and smelled her squirming hard toddler head and said, of course, Sof. We’ll be fine here.

And they are fine, she tells herself. Her day isn’t much different with two children than it was with one, and they’re sleeping now, and she has had time to wipe the jam from the floor and scoop the spilled rice from their lunch into the trash and brush her hair, and she has left a message for Sofia with Rosa that they are all going to Lina’s for the afternoon.

Antonia and Paolo live at the very edge of Carroll Gardens, where the schools are improving but where, every weekday, they can hear the slam and shout of the highway construction.

Places Antonia knew as abandoned space or farmland when she was a child are buildings now. Canals have been dug and filled; the new highways stream through old Brooklyn, dividing Red Hook from Carroll Gardens with a kind of sanguine finality: here, they say, this will be the bad neighborhood, and this will be the good. At the construction site for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Antonia ducks, crouching as though otherwise she will hit her head. The new highway will cut a deep gash through her old neighborhood. The Church of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary has already been demolished as part of what Robert Moses called slum clearance.

Julia and Robbie do not stir, even as Antonia navigates the pram over the cracked and neglected pavement endemic to Red Hook; even as she turns backward and thumps them stair by stair up to Lina’s apartment. “Mamma,” she says, as Lina opens the door, “the war is over.”

“The war is never over,” says Lina, and as she and Antonia look at one another they are both thinking of Carlo.