Antonia and Sofia do not always go to sleep when their mammas tell them to. They pass many hours pressing messages to one another through the wall between their bedrooms. They doze fitfully. Sleep is not as finite for them as it is for adults: there is no reason they cannot continue their conversation in a dream. They tell each other, your mamma is here tonight, because of course they know. And the mammas sit pressed together in one kitchen or another, sipping their wine and laughing, sometimes, and crying, others, and of course, they know when their daughters fall asleep, because they can still feel the shapes of those daughters turning against the insides of their bellies.

They remember being pregnant at the same time: tender to the touch, humming with potential. That, more than their husbands’ shared work, is what bonded them.

When they were pregnant is when Rosa and Lina took to whispered late-night conversations in one another’s apartments. There, by low light, they laid themselves open. They talked about the future, which always means talking about the past: about Rosa’s father and mother, their buzzing, bustling house, and about how Rosa wanted a bustling house of her own. But no needles, Rosa always said, no thread. No raw-pricked fingers. Her children would want for nothing. Lina, whose future had always felt like a vise tightening, was just relieved to love the baby growing inside of her more often than she was afraid of it. She thought of her own childhood, where there was no room for want in the face of the fight for survival. No have-to’s, she told Rosa. No musts. Her children would have a full world of choice. She would teach them to read.

It looks like a boy, the other Family ladies told Rosa at the butcher, at the park. It looks like twins, they told Lina, who was big, big, big, and could no longer fit in her usual shoes, and could not see her feet anyway, and who thought, of course, I will not be good at this either. The ladies reached out their hands to pinch Rosa’s and Lina’s faces and pat the domes of their stomachs. Rosa and Lina interlocked elbows and hobbled down the street. They realized that their babies would not have a blank slate: that they would be born into a world that expects them to be the right size, shape. If it’s a boy, they prayed, let him be good with his hands. If it’s a girl, let her be careful with her heart.

Lina, with her clammy hands and her pinched low back, added, let this child fear nothing.

Chapter 2