Antonia examines her line of bangs in the mirror and uses a sewing scissor to trim the ends of a couple errant hairs, carefully, breath held in as she cuts and only let out when the hair in question is determined to be the proper length. She leans away from the mirror to examine the bangs, which Sofia convinced her to cut in the middle of an interminably hot and boring July day. They don’t fit her face: they make her features look cramped; they tangle with the prominent line of her brow. They are constantly caught and blown by the wind. Sofia says she likes them, but Antonia will grow them back out, she decides. She finds a bobby pin and sweeps them back from her forehead.

At seven o’ clock, she reheats a casserole that Sofia’s mamma brought over on Thursday. The smell of tomato and cheese and the warmth of the oven lures her own mamma out from where she has been hiding in the deep folds of her favorite armchair. “It smells wonderful in here,” she says.

Antonia is piling bread slices in a bowl but she stops to turn around and kiss her mother on the cheek. “Sofia’s mamma brought it,” she says.

“She’s too good to us,” says Lina.

“She makes extra,” says Antonia. Here, honey, Rosa says, at least twice a week. Take this one to your mamma. Careful, it’s heavy. Her mother will not call Rosa to thank her. Antonia remembers when Rosa and Lina were close, closer than her and Sofia. The rainfall of their voices together in a different room. How warm the world used to feel. “It’ll be ready in two minutes.”

“Are you excited for school tomorrow?” asks her mother.

Antonia is surprised that her mother remembers she is starting school. “A little,” she says. And then, “I’m nervous, I think.”

“You’re going to do fine,” says her mother.

“You think so?” She is both desperate for her mother’s reassurance and not at all convinced by it. There is an exposed, pulsing vein in the body of their relationship that reminds Antonia you have to take care of her. She was made by her mother and she is also made, again and again, by herself.

“Don’t speak to anyone with slicked-back hair,” says Lina, before melting backward through the doorframe. Family men, she means. That telltale swoosh up and back away from the temples. Antonia leans over the open oven door to check on dinner. The heat hits her like a fist.

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