When confronted with the steely, stubborn, wall of will that has been built around the skin and bones of his daughter, Joey tries to channel the version of himself who, without speaking a single word, can leave a grown man straining not to wet himself. He searches for his cache of calm facial muscles, subtle hand gestures, implacable and aloof expressions.

Joey Colicchio can load a revolver in six seconds. His wife will still go down on him after sixteen years of marriage. He is the most powerful man in his jagged section of Brooklyn.

But his fourteen-year-old daughter finds him irrelevant and unimpressive. “You can’t make me,” she says casually, as he gestures furiously toward the front door, where the rest of the family waits. Joey, more than most fathers, is torn between acquiescing to the fierce small woman in front of him and a grand show of machismo—I’ll show you what I can and can’t make you do, he imagines saying. But he tries not to bring his work home with him.

Frankie is small and solemn as they leave, six years old and lost without Sofia. I want to stay too, she declares, eyes wide. Sofia feels a small tug at the string between her heart and her gut, asking if she should just go, sit in the pew, kneel with everyone else, spend five minutes running her tongue over the roof of her mouth to clear the doughy remains of the host. It wouldn’t be so bad, and Frankie doesn’t understand why Sofia is refusing to do this easy thing, this thing she does every week. The reflection of herself in Frankie’s eyes makes Sofia feel petty and silly, stubborn and strange. Incapable of doing the regular things everyone else does. But Sofia sets her jaw, refuses to leave, watches Frankie trudge down the hall, notices her papa paint a slow line across her mamma’s back with his hand as the three of them walk away. She is alone; she is elated; there is an unfamiliar empty air in the apartment.

That day for the first time Sofia sits at home as Sunday morning ripens. She watches passersby through the living room window and wonders how many people have so much time on Sunday, which in her family has always been marked by rushing: to church, home for dinner, into bed before it’s too late to get a good night’s rest before Monday. Her apartment feels huge. She wanders into the kitchen, carelessly sliding her hands along countertops and over the backs of chairs. She opens the fridge; dips her finger into the ragu waiting in a bowl for Sunday supper; opens a white paper bakery box and chips a corner off a jam-filled cookie. The sugar blooms against her tongue; it makes her eyes water.