In the fall, Sofia and Antonia do not start school again, for the first time in their memory. September yawns open and they fall in headfirst. They feel themselves borne along in the river of their lives. They are rushing toward what feels like a cliff, staring down a waterfall over which there is only marriage and children, sensible dresses, the business of running a home. They wage separate, silent battles with themselves: what they want; what will happen regardless of what they want. Love, they realize, is something that might happen regardless of whether they want it. They cannot tell whether it is the river itself or a life raft. They have to readjust how they thought it would be.

Chapter 12

Joey Colicchio has been working too hard. He has been overextending himself, stretching himself taut between the world where he is a parent to two girls with long legs and discerning eyes, and the world where he is violence personified, the terror in the room, the reason men wake sweating in the night. In both worlds, his very best is demanded, taken from him, drawn out. In both worlds, he is the center. The beating heart.

Joey had imagined that the wartime smuggling operation he had spearheaded would relieve him of some of the guilt that sits like a rock in his intestines. He had imagined that enabling other families to feed off of the sizzling, decadent, fat-bellied American dream would help him to justify the relative opulence of his own lifestyle, compared to so many of the families he knows. Joey wants to believe he pays his men as much as he can. He wants to believe he uses violence as sparingly as possible.

But some part of Joey knows this is untrue. You chose this life, he remembers. There would have been less violence in the bricklayers’ union, if he had kept quiet and paid his dues. He would have perpetrated less fear if he had stayed in his parents’ house until he was married, brought ten or twelve grandchildren into a tenement hovel. He would have disintegrated into mud next to his father in the graveyard. Dust to dust. Joey finds himself wondering whether he is a good man.

—

Rosa stopped looking to Lina for comfort years ago, but recently—Sofia disappearing all day, secretive and defensive about her plans, Frankie bursting into flames at the smallest provocation, Joey rarely home and restless when he is there—she has found herself picturing, in the quiet hours of the night, padding next door in slippers and her robe and sinking into the familiar old rhythm.

She knows this is impossible. Lina has turned into a spectacle, a cautionary tale. Aside from her brothers, from the wives that show up each Sunday, Rosa is left to muddle through her weeks alone. And just like she always does, Rosa understands this. She knows why it is so. She understands the structures that make it necessary.