“Hi,” says Sofia, and then looks down at her plate. Try talking to him, this time, says the Antonia in her head, but Sofia finds that every last thought she’s ever had has vanished, that the inside of her brain echoes like an empty marble corridor.

“I’m sorry about before,” says Saul. Someone passes him a basket of hot garlic bread. Sofia’s stomach growls so loudly she’s sure Saul heard it. Steam fogs up his glasses.

“No,” she says. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been so—” Sofia loses the words in her mouth; fills it with bread instead.

“I don’t know how things work here, yet,” says Saul. His accent is faint but trips over his tongue just slightly enough that Sofia cannot help but hang on to his every word. “I like to cook, but I think that’s not my place.”

Sofia laughs. “It’s definitely not,” she says. “I don’t love to cook, but I’m stuck with it.”

“Too bad we can’t trade,” Saul says. He passes her a dish of meatballs.

Sofia smiles, and something melts in the air between them. “Where did you learn to cook?” she asks.

“My mother,” says Saul. “It was just us, so I helped her.”

“Your mother—she’s still in—Germany?”

“Berlin,” says Saul. “I think.” He is suddenly very focused on spearing a green bean.

“You don’t know?”

“It’s impossible to know. The Nazis. It’s very bad there.” But there is a shortness to his voice Sofia hadn’t noticed before, and she feels like she is intruding.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Saul meets her eyes, and suddenly the two of them have accessed something much bigger than the politics of Sunday dinner. There is a real world out there, with real consequences, she thinks. A world where people don’t know where their mothers are. A world where everyone’s biggest concern isn’t whether a man offered to cook.

And then Bugs or Vito calls for Saul, and he turns away from Sofia, and she wonders if she imagined the whole conversation. “Sofia,” calls Rosa, “will you pass that dish, please,” and Sofia stands and brings the dish of garlic bread to the other end of the table, where Rosa sits across from Joey and Pop, who reaches into the dish and fishes out the best piece of bread without even looking at it, or Sofia. Suddenly Sofia feels very much tethered to the world she already knows. She glances down the table and Saul appears to be deep in conversation. Vito chucks him on the arm and the two of them laugh. Frankie is talking to Rosa, and Nonna, and to a woman Sofia thinks is Bugs’s wife. The four of them appear completely engrossed. Sofia is alone again.

—