This is how Antonia feels the loss of her papa: a light connecting her to the rest of the world suddenly goes out. The path forward is shrouded in darkness. Antonia drops her spoon and a long crack like a hair appears on the inside of her cereal bowl. Dread crawls like a thick slug down her throat.

And before Lina has managed to get the words out, Antonia knows that both of her parents are gone.

Chapter 4

The day Carlo disappears is a nightmare. It isn’t in focus; it feels like it must be happening to someone else, but for the few isolated moments that appear crystal clear, real as sun, as concrete. For the rest of their lives, the girls will know that Lina was convinced to take a draft of hot whiskey with a pill the innkeeper draws from a cabinet, saying, my wife used to—this will help. They will remember Joey and Rosa, faces like ice.

There is a moment Sofia and Antonia are alone in the room they shared. They are packing to leave. They are each absorbed in the process of picking up things—a sock, a camisole, a doll—and placing those things into their suitcases. When they make eye contact across the room, they both want to speak. But they cannot hear one another over the roar of the old world as it turns into a new one.

—

When they get home, Joey kisses Sofia on the top of the head and tells Rosa he has to go out for a meeting. Antonia releases Sofia’s sweaty hand and takes Lina’s cold one and they walk up the stairs to their own apartment. Rosa makes a thick minestrone that fogs up the kitchen until she opens the window and the steam escapes with a gasp into the evening air. While it simmers she makes meatballs, unable to keep still.

She uses a closely guarded recipe involving beef, veal, pork, and, Rosa swears, and her mother swore before her, a tear from the jar her grandmother filled when she sent her children to America. The meatballs are a cure-all, the centerpiece of christenings and birthdays, but are also applied as a salve for failed tests and broken hearts and the unnameable melancholy of November.