“I don’t know, Sofia,” says Antonia. Impatience hardens the ends of her words. Sofia will fall into infatuation now, like she always does. She will be in love by next week.

“I think he does,” says Sofia. Saul is quiet across the table, observant. He listens with both eyes and both hands as Joey talks to him about business, as Rosa offers him third helpings of everything. “I never imagined falling for someone who works for my papa.”

Antonia does not roll her eyes and tell Sofia that falling for anyone she has only seen for ten seconds from across a dinner table would be silly.

Paolo, like all of Joey’s men, is invited to dinner every week. He stays in Manhattan with his own family because Antonia doesn’t think she could pretend not to know him for three hours. There’s an easy solution to that, Tonia, Paolo says. Antonia presses her lips together. Paolo wants her to tell her mother about them. He wants her to say she will marry him. They argued over coffee, and Paolo left his to cool sadly on the table. He looked disappointed, and angry, and outside he threw up his hands and said, I don’t know if I can do this anymore, and walked away, and Antonia stood aching on the sidewalk alone. She has pictured him all week, nestled in the loud, fragrant recesses of his apartment, surrounded by his family. In her own bed she threatens to float up away from the mattress and dissolve into the night air.

“Antonia?”

“Sorry,” says Antonia. This is a perfect moment, she tells herself. Tell her. What do you think will happen? But she says, “I don’t know, I guess you just meet who you meet.”

“I guess,” says Sofia. And then, “I shouldn’t have asked you, should I,” which even Sofia knows is mean, but which she cannot help, because she feels mean, now: out of control, curdled. Inside herself she feels something small wither, something that had wanted to grow toward Antonia. Whatever it was disintegrates. People change, she tells herself.

She turns her attention to Saul, who has soft curls and could use a haircut. She watches for the rest of the meal. She sees how he holds a napkin, a glass of water, another man’s hand in greeting, so delicately the things he touches seem holy. Sofia wants to be held like that. Like a glass of water. Like a library book. Like a pair of folded socks.

Next to Sofia, Antonia argues with herself in silent agony. Say it, Antonia tells herself. Spit it out. But the desert stretching itself along her tongue and down her throat is too dry.