The human instinct for survival kicks in when we least expect it. Desperate for some change, Saul accepts the job.
* * *
—
When Joey gets home from hiring Saul, Rosa, who is cooking, cleaning, and circling Frankie like a hawk to make sure she does her homework, kisses his cheek. Joey reaches for her with both hands, circles her waist, steers her toward him with palms on the back of her rib cage, growls down for her mouth with his mouth. But Rosa spins away, swats him with the back of her hand. “Dinner in ten,” she says. Joey, feeling cold where he had hoped to wrap Rosa into his arms, into himself, kisses Frankie on the top of the head. “Papa, my hair,” Frankie says, shrugging him away.
Down the hall, Sofia is sitting at her desk, chin propped up on her hand, hair glinting in a circle of lamplight. Joey imagines Sofia, four years old, running to him when he got home. Six, and sitting on his lap when they ran out of chairs at dinner, eating his olives when she thinks he isn’t looking and then grinning up at him, maniacal, bright as lightning.
Sofia, eight, hand on the back of small Antonia, who has collapsed into sobs at their kitchen table for the second time that week. Sofia, half her attention on the grief of her friend, and half watching Joey’s face the way a hawk watches a vole twitch, hundreds of feet below on the earth. I know what you did.
All I’ve wanted is to make life easier for you, Joey wants to say to Sofia. But Carlo’s face surfaces in his mind. That, and the heart-swell of power. The perfection of control. Liar, says his memory.
Sofia at fourteen, glaring at him, fearless, as he and Rosa and Frankie left for church. She was always his girl.
Go to her, he commands himself. Nothing moves.
Sofia, seventeen, cannot feel her papa’s desperation, and cannot connect to herself at four, six, eight, fourteen. Seventeen is an abyss: she feels divorced from her past selves, with their clearer heartbreaks. And the future—so close now the walls of the present buckle under its weight—is still a swirling panic. Sofia feels alone. She feels disconnected.
And when she sees Saul Grossman for the first time across a Sunday dinner table, she decides in an instant what she needs to tie herself back to the earth.
Saul is thin and dark-eyed. Close-shaven. Sofia watches him eat. He mixes everything together, small bits of beans and meat and cured lemon rind and sweet melon all in one bite. He chews carefully.
Sofia knees Antonia under the table. “Do you know who that is?”
Antonia looks. “I haven’t seen him before,” she says. I can ask Paolo, she almost says. It would slip out so easily. She turns her attention back to her plate.
“I heard my parents talking,” Sofia says. “My father hired a Jew, from Germany. Does he look like a Jew to you?”
“I don’t know, Sofia,” says Antonia. Impatience hardens the ends of her words. Sofia will fall into infatuation now, like she always does. She will be in love by next week.
“I think he does,” says Sofia. Saul is quiet across the table, observant. He listens with both eyes and both hands as Joey talks to him about business, as Rosa offers him third helpings of everything. “I never imagined falling for someone who works for my papa.”
Antonia does not roll her eyes and tell Sofia that falling for anyone she has only seen for ten seconds from across a dinner table would be silly.
Paolo, like all of Joey’s men, is invited to dinner every week. He stays in Manhattan with his own family because Antonia doesn’t think she could pretend not to know him for three hours. There’s an easy solution to that, Tonia, Paolo says. Antonia presses her lips together. Paolo wants her to tell her mother about them. He wants her to say she will marry him. They argued over coffee, and Paolo left his to cool sadly on the table. He looked disappointed, and angry, and outside he threw up his hands and said, I don’t know if I can do this anymore, and walked away, and Antonia stood aching on the sidewalk alone. She has pictured him all week, nestled in the loud, fragrant recesses of his apartment, surrounded by his family. In her own bed she threatens to float up away from the mattress and dissolve into the night air.
“Antonia?”
“Sorry,” says Antonia. This is a perfect moment, she tells herself. Tell her. What do you think will happen? But she says, “I don’t know, I guess you just meet who you meet.”
“I guess,” says Sofia. And then, “I shouldn’t have asked you, should I,” which even Sofia knows is mean, but which she cannot help, because she feels mean, now: out of control, curdled. Inside herself she feels something small wither, something that had wanted to grow toward Antonia. Whatever it was disintegrates. People change, she tells herself.