Five years ago she lay holding him—the same person, somehow, but nine pounds and wailing, reaching, a small packaged parcel of unending, absolute need. Antonia remembers settling Robbie to her breast and shutting her eyes, trying to be somewhere else. Trying to be someone else. Sure she couldn’t feed Robbie when she was just an aching cavern of need herself.

Antonia puts a hand to her belly and feels fear like ice water trickling down her spine.

The idea of a raw egg makes her queasy and she slathers jam on toast for Robbie, who settles into his chair at the kitchen table with a comic book. “School starts soon,” Antonia says to Robbie. He nods. He swings his feet against the floor, scuffing it like Sofia used to do. While he eats, Antonia calls Sofia.

—

Sofia and Antonia carve the afternoon out of their regular lives to spend together, just the two of them.

They don’t do this often anymore, so there is a moment it is strained: the conversation dragging behind them, each of them flicking her eyes up to the clock behind the deli counter. They are eating pastrami sandwiches downtown.

“How did you find this place, again?” Antonia asks.

“Saul used to work here,” replies Sofia. “He took me here once before we got married. He says they make the best pastrami in the city.”

Antonia’s mouth is full. She nods. There is something fluttering in her heart; she has not told Sofia the reason for their lunch. She feels rebellious, like drinking martinis all day, like being late to pick up Robbie from school, like shucking off her responsibilities, one by one like corn husks, until her glistening insides are exposed to the sun. She suggested downtown; she is wearing slacks, which bunch uncomfortably in her lap and which, she realizes, as the pastrami fills her up like a water balloon held over the mouth of a fire hydrant, might not have been practical for this particular lunch spot.

“Can you imagine?” Sofia says, looking around. “If Papa hadn’t given him a job, Saul could still be working here.”

Antonia swallows; she has been preoccupied by this exact thought experiment lately: what if, could have been. She looks back and sees her life as a series of branching paths; she is obsessed with wondering what would have happened if she had taken another. If she had saved up and gone to university. If she had gotten pregnant before she was married. If she had never found her way back to her mamma. If her papa had never been killed. If she had never married Paolo. If she hadn’t messed up her days last month. Inside her belly she imagines something growing. She imagines herself disintegrating. Stupid, she tells herself.

“What’s wrong?” Sofia asks.

“Nothing,” says Antonia. “How’s work.”