She looked around: toys scattered between the two couches, still some light through the windows. She sat at the flour-dusted table, and I stood watching her; at seven, I’d go. She didn’t answer, she just fled to her mother-in-law’s next door, where she stayed for half an hour.

I knew she wouldn’t be back right away, so I took a book of poetry off the shelf, started reading, silently composed a few lines of my own, wrote some of them down, and wound up using them in my description of Angelo at the start of this chapter.

When she returned to the kitchen, Daniela resumed the conversation with an opening statement that sounded rehearsed: “And so what if I wanted to be like Ferrante—didn’t you start writing poetry because you read Gozzano’s poems about pastarelle?”

This was partly true, something she must have found online that I told to a journalist one time. While I watched, my ego stroked, she took a piece of chicken out of the freezer and put it into the microwave set to defrost, then opened a container of formula.

I told her I didn’t want to influence her, that she could do whatever she liked, and we changed the subject.

My father arrived in his wheelchair. He’d taken seriously the order of four months’ complete rest to heal his tendon. He and my mother sat down on the living room couch, and they each took a twin in their arms and started talking about the Partito Democratico—the party my brother worked for—while Daniela tried to get them to tell her if they wanted to stay for dinner or not.

“Only if it’s not too much trouble,” they kept saying.

“Okay, so what would you like?”

“Really, whatever you have—whatever’s easiest.”

Daniela found it frustrating that my parents never had the guts to just ask her for something. In her view, professing to not have needs was a way of refusing her love. They could pop in for dinner on a Saturday night for no reason, yet never seemed to ask for anything. “We spend every single day together and they’re always so formal,” she’d say. “They make me feel like there’s something wrong with me.”