When her family arrives home, Sofia sits patiently as her father, still in his Sunday best, lectures her on the need to participate in the family and follow direction. She nods as her mamma, fighting back tears, says, sometimes, Sofia, you just have to do things you don’t want to do. Sofia weighs this. Do I?

But Sofia is distracted by a deep, manic curiosity for the rest of the day. It trembles her fingers and causes her to kick her right foot against her left heel until she has a bruise. It drags her to the telephone four times and it makes her dial the number for Antonia’s building twice before she hangs up. It chews the pointer fingernail on her left hand to the quick.

Antonia arrives for dinner at five and Sofia manages not to ask her where she has been. Two years ago, Sofia would have asked. She would have pulled Antonia into a closet, sweet-breathed and sticky, and whispered, what, what was it. She would have reached her arms out and tickled Antonia between the ribs until Antonia gave up the secret, until it was splayed out on the floor for both of them to examine. But tonight, Sofia is sure that admitting Antonia has a secret would make it worse. Asking her about it would be like collecting all the power in the room into a small glowing golden orb and placing it into Antonia’s waiting hands, Sofia left to beg at her feet. Sofia spends supper pushing small pieces of eggplant into a circle orbiting her plate. She stays quiet.

—

In an act of defiance that feels like a rebellion and a homecoming all at once, Antonia has, for the last several months, snuck away on Sunday mornings. She leaves Lina, with her thin cigarettes and her delicate crossed ankles in their browning house shoes, with her stack of books and her trail of things she has forgotten: comb, cooling cup of tea, light sweater, pile of mail, all left to molder where they sit. She leaves Sofia, who is loud and confident and who gives Antonia energy to go on but who also exhausts her. She leaves all of this, and she goes to Sunday morning Mass, eleven o’clock at the Church of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

She tells herself she goes for the smell. It is a combination of old books and incense and vacant air that has been trapped in the cavernous rafters and is doled out to the parishioners breath by sweet breath. It is sharp and toothy pine in the winter and cool metallic stone in the summer and all year long, the distinctly floral scent of relief.