Every day, it seems, Joey shuts the parlor doors for another evening meeting and Rosa wrings a dishtowel to shreds before making a platter of coffee and cake for Joey’s associates, Frankie comes home from school and tells the rest of them that Donny Giordano said his brother’s enlisting and anyone who doesn’t is an America-hating, Nazi-loving, kraut-slurping coward, and the room goes silent because Joey employs a raft of able-bodied young men who are already fighting a war of sorts, but they don’t talk about it at the supper table, and later Rosa leaves a pair of knitting needles conspicuously on Sofia’s bed because they won’t have her working in a factory like the other women but they’ll be damned if she doesn’t participate at all, and there are socks to be sent off in the army care packages. Every day the war circles closer and it tells Sofia, you decide to do something useful, or I’ll decide for you.

I don’t know what to do, she tells it, desperately. She hangs out her bedroom window like limp linen, she drapes herself over furniture all over the house. Sofia lying half-comatose on the sofa, sideways in an armchair, sprawled out in the kitchen so Rosa almost trips over her. I don’t know what I want.

Antonia has shrunk away from Sofia’s field of vision. A piece of Antonia—a piece Sofia has almost always been able to scent, to feel out—is missing. Or rather, it is somewhere Sofia has no access to. As the last months of high school tick away, Sofia considers the options laid out before her: marriage, university and then marriage, secretarial school and then marriage. None of them feel like a life she wants to step into. With only herself for company, Sofia feels violently confronted by that which she has not figured out, and expresses it by picking fights with her mother, by losing her temper with Frankie. You’ve been a real pill lately, nine-year-old Frankie tells Sofia, in the same infuriatingly matter-of-fact tone she talks to everyone with, child or adult, Family or grandparent. Where Sofia always wanted to be the center of attention, Frankie has managed to be simply comfortable in any situation. She follows the men’s discussions of politics and finances at Sunday dinner. She never burns food when asked to mind a pot. The rules seem slackened for her, as if Rosa and Joey were tired out by raising Sofia and now if Frankie doesn’t want to brush her hair one morning, she doesn’t have to; if Frankie wants to go to a movie with a friend and no parents, she is allowed to. No one ever says, Frankie, you don’t fit here. And Frankie manages to do whatever she wants anyway.