Antonia’s mamma, Lina, has a nervous constitution. As a child Lina stayed in to read when the other children played rough outside. She looked back and forth five or six times before crossing streets. She startled easily. Lina’s mother often looked at her sternly, shook her head, sighed. Lina will always be able to picture this. Look; shake; sigh. Marrying Carlo Russo did not make her less nervous.

Every time Antonia’s papa, Carlo, leaves the house, fear whittles away at Lina’s person until he is home again. And when Tommy Fianzo decides he needs Carlo to spend nights picking up and transporting crates of Canadian liquor, fear grips Lina around the throat and will not let her sleep at all.

So Lina develops a system: she doesn’t worry until the sun comes up. When she is awakened by the pulled-taffy air stretched between herself and Carlo, by the knowledge that he is elsewhere and has taken the most vulnerable part of her with him, Lina slips out of bed and alights on the floor lightly, like a bird. She pads down the steps of her building and up into the Colicchio apartment next door. She uses her spare key, and she sits on the couch with Rosa until she can bear the silence of her own apartment.

Just before dawn, Lina knows a key will turn in the front door. Carlo will move quietly into the apartment. And it, and she, will settle back down into the earth where they belong.

—

Sofia’s mamma, Rosa, remembers her own father working nights. Rosa stayed at home with her mother, who spent her days finishing the buttonholes of men’s shirts, making small stitches and worrying about Rosa’s father, spinning yarns for her children about her childhood before the boat ride to America, shouting at them to finish their homework, for God’s sake, to study, to sit up straight, to be careful, to make something of themselves, her babies. Rosa’s mother, with her raw fingertips from sewing, slicing onions for dinner and never wincing, but shutting her mouth, quiet for once, which is how Rosa and her siblings knew she was in pain. This all made sense to Rosa: the building of community and home no matter how, no matter where, no matter what the cost.

So when she met tall and striking Joey Colicchio, who had accepted a job from her father’s associate Tommy Fianzo Sr., Rosa knew what it would take to build her own house.

—