Sofia and Antonia learn new words. Stock market, breadline. Unemployment. Sofia’s father is busier than ever. He has new men working for him. He has less time to tell Sofia about his day, but he sneaks into her bedroom when he gets home with a caramel or a lemon drop and whispers, don’t tell your mamma. Sofia’s mother makes Sunday dinners big enough to feed whole countries and sends everyone home with packages of leftovers. Sofia and Antonia sit and watch as Rosa and Joey make their rounds, talking to the men Joey has hired and their wives, to Rosa’s parents when they come, to Rosa’s brothers and sisters. There are no more Fianzos at dinner. No more Uncle Tommy, no more Uncle Billy. Thankfully, no more Fianzo children, whose thick, pinching fingers had always been the bane of Sunday. Sofia and Antonia balance Frankie between them on two chairs squeezed next to one another and feed her green beans and torn chunks of bread. They make faces when no one is looking. They play tic-tac-toe on napkins.

Sometimes, especially as they turn ten, and eleven, Sofia leaves Frankie with Antonia and ventures into the clumps of adults strewn about the rooms of her home. She reads the newspaper over men’s shoulders and imitates their disdainful sighs about the economy, and listens to their worries that Roosevelt will be no better than Hoover, and their jokes that a new Prohibition would make the Family rich again. They say, Big Joe, this your girl? You’ll have your hands full with this one. She wends her way into conspiratorial hives of women, who talk about hair salons and grocers as a flimsy shield for what they really want to know about one another. The women whisper their future families into being. Sofia breathes in their perfume. They think she is precocious, fearless, a little uncouth. Soon she is shooed back to Antonia, where she will whisper, that one’s pregnant, over Frankie’s head. Those want to move to the country, but they need savings. One week, she comes back with the gleaned details of sex itself, her face alight with shock and excitement. Antonia is horrified to learn about her body’s permeability. Adulthood, she worries, will make her feel no more solid than she does now. Antonia is happier with Frankie, where anything can be made up and believed and the stakes are not so high. Where she doesn’t have to see how many other adults are moving through the world with so much more force and presence than her own mamma.