Sofia watches Joey come home from her seat at the kitchen table, where she is supposed to be folding napkins. Joey is so big the kitchen is dwarfed by comparison. He hangs his hat on its hook and runs his fingers through his hair along the little streaks of gray and white that line his temples. He sidles up behind Rosa and cups the twin domes of her shoulders with his big hands and buries his face in her hair. She leans her weight into his hands and bends her elbow to hold his fingers with her own. He says, “I dealt with it,” and Sofia says, “Dealt with what?” from the table and he says, “Nothing, cara mia.”

So Joey Colicchio stands in his kitchen. He watches his wife stir soup and he watches his daughter stare, brow creased and lips pursed, at a stack of wrinkled place mats. He is glued in place.

He feels utterly alone.

—

Next door, Antonia and Lina Russo are in the silent eye of a hurricane.

Antonia is in her room. She is sitting at the edge of her neatly made bed, and she is scared.

Everything has turned upside down, inside out. Everything is the quick skipped-heartbeat sick-stomach feeling of being in deep trouble.

Cara mia, Antonia imagines her father saying. She longs for the smell of him, for the wide soothing warmth of his hands, for the gravitational pull of her body toward the spot where it fits, curled into his chest.

Of course.

—

As the table is set around her, Sofia chews on a pencil eraser. School starts in a week. Her mamma puts bowls on the table with no tablecloth. Her papa pours deep glasses of wine from a jug at the back of the pantry. Antonia and her mamma come over from next door and the five of them crowd around the table. Lina Russo is always small but tonight she is almost translucent in her chair. She sits the still, calm vigil of someone to whom the worst thing has happened. Her soup steams, untouched in front of her.

At their corner of the table, Sofia and Antonia eat quickly, messily. Sofia is filled with a restless discomfort, and wants simultaneously to break the tension at the table and to sink down and flatten under its weight. Antonia watches her mamma out of the corner of her eye. Lina is not eating. Antonia feels like she has woken up on another planet. She wants to be anywhere else. So when Sofia speaks, she feels relief pour down through her body and she shakes with adrenaline, with dread, with the shock of her old body being thrust so viciously forward through passing time.

“I have new dress-up clothes,” Sofia says.

Antonia looks up from her soup. Thank you. “What are they?”