You’re always a pill, Sofia snaps back at her, and then storms into her bedroom and feels like a monstrous, awkward thing.

—

When Paolo invites Antonia to supper at his family’s house, she arrives five minutes early and climbs the creaking stairs slowly, listening to the percussion and melody of the families behind their peeling apartment doors. Paolo’s apartment has four rooms stretched out along a narrow hall. The graying walls give off a faint aroma of simmering tomatoes and dusty paint and the sweat of four sons. The wooden floors are scratched by gravel and work boots and thirty years’ worth of rearranging furniture and boys running back and forth down the lengths of boards. It is an apartment that would tell stories about its occupants, even if they weren’t there. It does its best to contain Paolo’s family—to soak up the smells of their cooking and the steam from their showers and the tears from their fights. Paolo shares a room with one brother, two older brothers sandwich into a second room, his parents sleep in a third, and the six of them cook, drink, eat, fight, laugh, cry, and breathe together in the final room. They seem to coexist in their small apartment by moving so quickly they are hard to keep track of. Antonia, sitting at the kitchen table folding napkins, feels like she is on a carousel: slightly dizzy, a little exhilarated, trying fruitlessly to keep track of the ever-changing view. His family is loud and affectionate. His mother: small, wide, exclamatory, kisses Antonia on both cheeks, holds her face and looks into her eyes and says, “So this is the beautiful girl keeping our Paolo on the other side of the river so often lately?” and Antonia tries to smile but because Paolo’s mother is still holding her cheeks, she ends up grimacing oddly. Paolo’s father is tall, with long limbs like an octopus and thick black spectacles, and cries, “Basta, Viviana, give the poor boy a chance!” and Paolo’s mother swats him with a dishtowel and turns back to the stove. Paolo’s brothers pay Antonia no mind, engaged as they are in a loud argument about whether to enlist in the army. “I’ll cut off your feet in your sleep before I see you go to war,” warns Viviana, gesticulating with her butcher knife, and the boys duck out of the way just in case she means to do it now.

Paolo wants Antonia to marry him. Antonia can feel her desire to say yes beating like a drum on the inside of her chest. She thinks, often, of Sofia: the relief it must be to do what you want, when you want.