* * *
—
In the kitchen, Saul has made a pot of tea. He has sliced bread for toast. He has set two eggs next to one another on the counter. “Boiled?” he asks Sofia as she comes out of the bathroom. Sofia wants to refuse herself food. She wants to feel the empty throb of her stomach until she figures out what is wrong with her. But hunger has taken on a new ferocity over the course of her pregnancy and Sofia finds herself unable to resist her primal needs: to pee, to sleep, to eat.
“Boiled,” she responds, and sits at the table. It is still strange for her to sit in a kitchen that belongs to her, that smells like the food she and Saul eat, that is not presided over by her own mamma. It is strange to run out of olive oil, soap, bleach. Strange to wake up next to Saul every day. It makes her giddy; it makes her nervous. It feels like she is a child, playing house with Antonia. She has whiplash from the speed at which her life morphed into this adult shape. As her body stretches against the confines of her child’s skin, Sofia wants, again and again, to be angry. Or else, she is joyous and bursting with energy, peppering kisses over the surface of Saul’s chest and shoulders, making him late for work.
But Saul is unrelentingly kind. He makes room for her anger. He stays grounded when Sofia threatens to explode.
There is nothing tangible for Sofia to fight against.
And so she finds herself thinking about her words, swallowing down snappy comebacks and dissatisfactions that jar like rocks against one another in her throat. She finds herself choosing a gentleness she has never known before, conserving her energy.
At night, she curls into Saul’s side like an animal making a nest.
It doesn’t feel permanent. Sofia can no more see the rest of her life now than she could when she was fifteen. She considered a moment of panic at until death us do part but her death is impossible to imagine.
Saul toasts the bread and boils the eggs. He hands Sofia a plate with two slices of toast drizzled with honey, an egg still rolling in its hot shell. “I have to go in early, but I’ll be back early.” Sofia chews and nods. Saul kisses her on the cheek. He says, “I’ll call about dinner.”
“Thank you,” says Sofia, but Saul doesn’t hear her as he leaves.
The hours after Saul leaves for work stretch out in front of her and disappear into the distance. Sofia idles: forgetting to comb her hair, leaving her dishes in the sink. Standing limply in the living room, peering out the window. She is fourteen, raiding the fridge while her family is at Mass. Inside her body the baby she made with Saul is fluttering its hands and feet against her organs, tap-tapping like a branch against a window, like the wings of a moth against a screen door.
* * *
—
On the first Friday of July in 1942, as he does every first Friday of every month, Joey Colicchio dresses in his simplest and most expensive suit. He shaves, though it is afternoon and he already shaved once in the morning. He inhales the peppermint of his aftershave and checks his teeth for poppy seeds. He checks his breast pocket for the Fianzo envelope, and wipes his palms on his trousers before leaving the house.
Outside, Saul stands patiently on the sidewalk. His face is calm; it is one of the things Joey likes most about him. His face was calm in the heart of the bustling deli where Joey found him; and it is calm now, in long sleeves and pants on a July afternoon. “Thank you for meeting me,” says Joey, kissing Saul on both cheeks. They get into a waiting car, which is idling on the street in front of Joey’s building. Saul does not ask why; it is something else Joey likes about him. Saul trusts that he will learn what he needs to know when he needs to know it.
Joey is quiet for the ten-minute car ride to the waterfront. The driver is an old associate: someone he remembers from his early days with the Fianzos. He remembers standing with this man outside of an unmarked door at the ragged bottom of the Bowery, pursed lips and no eye contact as they waited for Tommy Fianzo to come back from a meeting. He took longer than they had expected, Joey remembers, but not so long that Joey and the other associate had had to go after him. Tommy had burst from the door with a wide smile and a half-moon of blood blooming from a cut on his cheek; he had been wiping slick red from his palms. He had handed Joey a bloody handkerchief and said, andiamo, jaunty, and the three of them had turned left and walked south for oysters, for chocolate fondue poured by women with stars for eyes and clouds for skin, for giddy, ecstatic consumption of every variety. Creation and destruction: they lived on the border; they played with sparks in rooms full of gunpowder. Tommy Fianzo, grinning maniacally as his cheek bled, as adrenaline ravaged all three of them, as the sun set, sinking bloody into the Hudson.