No longer, she thinks, as her daughter’s fiancé comes knocking at her door, that Family-slick hair, those irresistible high cheekbones, the toothy smile, one end of his mouth turned up so everything is a joke, everything is sex, everything is tension and energy and charm. Exuding that ignorant young-man confidence, that certainty that the world will roll out before him like a red carpet, that rejection of mortality. You’ve never felt fragile, Lina thinks as she shakes his hand, as he inclines his head, warmly, as she beckons him in, as Antonia stands looking back and forth, from her fiancé to her mother. Lina understands the power of fear, now: it brings into sharp focus that which is most important. You’ve never been hurt, she thinks, smiling at Paolo.
As for Paolo, he will not remember the food or the conversation of this evening. He will remember the glow of Antonia, bending over a dish. The way Antonia makes sure her mamma has everything on her plate before serving herself. The incandescence of her face as she looks at him, the strength in her set jaw, her determination breaking in waves over Paolo and Lina as they eat. This is someone to build with, Paolo thinks. This is someone to care for. This is someone who will care for me.
* * *
—
Two weeks later, on a Thursday evening in April, Sofia hears the doorbell and leaps away from her studying, which she was doing half-heartedly anyway. She hopes it is Saul, and it is—she hears him greet her mamma. The smoothness of his voice and steps echoing down the hall.
Toward her. He’s walking toward her.
Sofia watches Saul from behind her cracked-open bedroom door. There is a way he has of just moving that shows Sofia he takes care of people. There are secrets vying for space behind his hooded eyes, a dark downturn of his mouth when he doesn’t want to answer a question that causes Sofia to gasp for air. Her heart thuds, resonating wildly around her chest, threatening to jump out of her mouth. Everything pounds, from her face to her fingertips to her jellied legs. He’s three feet away from her. He’s going to open the bathroom door.
“Hello,” says Sofia. He looks up. They are standing face-to-face, Sofia hiding halfway behind her cracked-open bedroom door and Saul, one hand on the bathroom door already, eyes quizzical, looking right at Sofia.
“Hello,” he says.
And then something in Sofia erupts. And she is reaching out her hand and she is grasping a handful of his shirt and pulling him forward, and his eyes widen in mild surprise as Sofia tilts her face toward him and kisses him, damp and breathy, messy and fast.
She pulls away and looks at his face. Sofia has kissed enough boys to know they should look astounded after she pulls away. They should look amazed at their luck.
Saul is smiling, but he doesn’t look astounded. He looks like he’s about to laugh. “Sofia, right?” he says.
For an agonizing second, Sofia believes that her humiliation will be so powerful she will burrow down into the earth. She shuts her eyes and wills her body to sink directly through the floor.
When she opens her eyes Saul is still in front of her. “I’m sorry,” she stammers. “I’m so—”
“It’s okay,” he says, and the way he says it makes Sofia feel like it might, after all, be okay. “I have a meeting with your father,” he says. “I should—”
“Go,” she says. “Go.”
That night Sofia tosses and turns in a pool of nervous sweat, hair slick against her damp neck, sheets alternately boiling and then freezing. What will I say to you, she wonders, if I see you again?
* * *
—
She doesn’t have to wonder long. Sofia spends a restless Saturday staring out her bedroom window but Saul arrives early on Sunday, before Sofia’s extended family, before the group of three to five uncles, Vito or Nico or Bugs, something like that, each of them, before their wives, who Sofia used to think were the height of glamour but lately whose acrylic nails and carefully curled hair and over-perfumed necks Sofia finds exhausting, trite, boring: this is, of course, a reflection of Sofia’s own boredom, her own exhaustion, her own unanswered questions. There are only two months of high school left, and then nothingness.
Antonia isn’t coming; she’s in Manhattan with Paolo’s family again, and Sofia is relieved she will not have to navigate Antonia’s knowing glance, the way she understands everything Sofia is thinking without Sofia saying a thing. It is draining to watch Antonia’s life spring forward in carefully constructed leaps. It makes Sofia feel like she is doing everything wrong.
The radio is on in the kitchen and Rosa is sifting powdered sugar over tarts and hazelnut cookies and there is the big pot, full of boiling water on the stove. Sofia is rolling out dough on the counter, breathing out each time she pushes the rolling pin away from herself, and Frankie is next to her, mincing onions and rolling stacks of basil leaves into thin tubes to slice them into ribbons. Sofia’s hair has escaped into a dusty, floured cloud around her head, and there are stinging onion tears dripping from the corners of her eyes when she hears a voice ask, “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help in here?”