There is a moment Sofia and Antonia are alone in the room they shared. They are packing to leave. They are each absorbed in the process of picking up things—a sock, a camisole, a doll—and placing those things into their suitcases. When they make eye contact across the room, they both want to speak. But they cannot hear one another over the roar of the old world as it turns into a new one.
* * *
—
When they get home, Joey kisses Sofia on the top of the head and tells Rosa he has to go out for a meeting. Antonia releases Sofia’s sweaty hand and takes Lina’s cold one and they walk up the stairs to their own apartment. Rosa makes a thick minestrone that fogs up the kitchen until she opens the window and the steam escapes with a gasp into the evening air. While it simmers she makes meatballs, unable to keep still.
She uses a closely guarded recipe involving beef, veal, pork, and, Rosa swears, and her mother swore before her, a tear from the jar her grandmother filled when she sent her children to America. The meatballs are a cure-all, the centerpiece of christenings and birthdays, but are also applied as a salve for failed tests and broken hearts and the unnameable melancholy of November.
Rosa is no stranger to the risks of the life she was born into, and so as she kneads the meatball mixture she is visited by a memory of her own mamma making dinner, waiting for her papa. Joey puts himself in danger, and Rosa holds the fear that something might happen to him. She holds it for Joey, who has no time to waste on fear, and for Sofia, who may someday need to hold a family’s worth of fear but who for now is spared. Her heart aches for Lina, who always felt fear but never knew how to contain it within herself, to use it as fuel. Rosa does not feel paralyzed in the face of Lina’s catastrophe; instead, she feels herself expand to hold every note and tremble of worry. She will protect her family. She will fight for them. She will do this at the cost of everything else.
Rosa watches the carrots and tomatoes and beans as they spin in the boiling broth and feels herself settle. She remembers her mother in the kitchen, wrist-deep in ground meat, humming. Her father out, again, working—God knows where. God knows with whom. For God knows how long.
* * *
—
Joey knows without even asking that he needs to meet with Tommy Fianzo. There is a swirling, nauseous pit where his stomach and heart should be.
Joey knows Carlo would never have left his family. He also knows Tommy Fianzo would do anything to protect his standing as one of the most powerful men in Brooklyn. Carlo’s ambivalence had been a weakness.
At the mouth of the Red Hook waterfront there is a bedraggled concrete building where the Fianzos hold court. As Joey arrives he can smell the sea and has to stop and hold a hand to his chest to control himself. He saw Carlo just last night. Joey knew this was coming, didn’t he? Somehow, he knew it would be soon. You should have warned him, he tells himself. And in the same moment, I could never have warned him. I would have ended up just like him. Sofia’s face swims to the forefront of his mind. He made his own decisions.
And then, this is your fault.
Tommy is standing by the window of his office. When he sees Joey, he wraps him in a hug. He thumps Joey on the back, a clap that reverberates through Joey’s heart and lungs. “I’m sorry about all this,” he says. Joey can hear Tommy’s voice move out around them in waves. It gets swallowed in the concrete walls. Joey fights an urge to sink into the comforting arms of the man who has guided him since he was a teenager.
Tommy pours them both glasses of wine. He gestures to the chair on one side of his desk and sits in the other. “Tension,” he says, “does not look good, in a family. Conflict does not look good.” He takes a sip of his wine. “It exposes us. It makes us vulnerable. You know Eli Leibovich?”
Joey shakes his head. No.
“You will, soon. He’s making a name for himself on the Lower East Side. Jewish. Smart as hell.”
Joey is used to the nature of a meeting with Tommy Fianzo. Tommy will get to his point eventually. His power affords him the right to express himself in whatever way he wants to. Even if he has just disappeared your best friend.
“I’m responsible for a lot of people, Colicchio. Not just you, and not just our flighty friend. A lot of men, and each of them has a family to take care of. So I look at someone like Carlo, and where you see a man who regrets his choices, who wants something different for himself and his family, I see a man who is endangering not just himself but me, and you, and everyone else in this Family. He was skimming off the top, did you know that?”