With her eyes closed, Lina can feel a crackling in the air, an omen of change sneaking along the floorboards. Vines of it winding their way up and down the banisters. Something big is coming.
Two days later, Sofia is sweating in her kitchen.
It’s not true that Sofia isn’t much for cooking. She doesn’t know that Eli said this about her, but she knows it’s whispered about in the neighborhood shops. Groups of mothers stop their conversations when Sofia approaches with her shopping basket. Trying something new? they might ask. Just some staples, Sofia responds, as haughtily as she can while weighed down by flour, tomatoes, eggs, garlic.
Sofia knows her mamma’s recipes the way she knows the rhythm of a Sunday Mass. Just because she doesn’t use them every day doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
By sense-memory, she unrolls the flank steak. It curls slightly, the blood and muscle of it contracting on her counter. It smells like coins. She takes a mallet and pounds it until it lies flat. It will be lined with speckled sliced mortadella, a layer of wilted spinach, and a mixture of basil, parsley, pine nuts, and parmesan. It will be rolled up and simmered in wine, tomatoes, and bay. All the windows in the house are open, lazy fans pushing the hot kitchen air around. Sofia’s hair is plastered to the back of her neck
The front door clicks. It’s not Saul, who is late. It’s Antonia, holding the small bundle of baby Enzo in one arm and a shopping bag in the other. “Christ, Tonia, you gave birth two weeks ago, what are you doing shopping?” Sofia asks. She wraps Antonia in her arms and then unwraps Enzo from his bundle of blankets and kisses him. “It’s a thousand degrees out, and you have him in all these blankets!”
Sofia hopes her voice is cheery but not saccharine; she examines Antonia as closely as she can. Antonia looks exhausted, but her hair is clean. Her eyes meet Sofia’s. She seems okay, Sofia thinks. “Are you okay?” she asks Antonia.
“I am,” says Antonia. She is almost giddy. She is sleepless and aching still, but she is so surprised she survived her second birth that she’s been cheerful, almost bubbly. Robbie has had to squirm away from her grasping hands; Paolo wonders where his mild-mannered, brooding wife has gone. Antonia is superwoman. Antonia can do anything. “I’m going to ask your mamma about the seafood.” Antonia leaves Sofia singing to Enzo in the hallway.
Sofia can just sense Robbie, sprinting off into the recesses of the apartment to find Julia. She looks down into Enzo’s liquid brown eyes, his wrinkled face. “Is your mamma okay?” Sofia asks him. Enzo does not answer.
Sofia hears a key in the lock and she hopes it is Saul this time.
And then she hears a door slam.
* * *
—
Saul knew showing at dinner would cause a stir but not showing would be an even bigger problem and so he is standing in his front hall, wincing as he brushes his curls away from his eyes, as he shrugs off the trappings of his briefcase, his shoes. The house smells like meat and spices and his mouth waters. He hasn’t eaten in hours.
“Paolo, is that you?” comes Antonia’s voice. “Paolo, I asked you to meet me at the house this afternoon, did you forget?” She is walking toward Saul, who has the impulse to turn toward the wall. Instead he freezes, and so when Antonia turns into the entryway she is face-to-face with Saul, whose eye has been blackened and whose lip has been purpled and swollen. Antonia steps backward in shock. “What happened to you?” she says. Small teardrops of blood litter the front of his shirt. He does not speak. He hasn’t seen himself.
Antonia reaches a hand out and hovers it alongside Saul’s face, afraid to touch him, and unable to stop herself. “Let me get you some ice,” she says.
“Oh, my God.” Sofia is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, Enzo in the crook of her elbow. “Oh my God, Saul!”
Saul raises his eyes to meet Sofia’s. “I’m okay,” he says to her.
“What happened to you?” Sofia has dropped a dishtowel, stained with steak juice and tomato and crusted with small fluttering garlic skins, onto the floor.
“Sofia, the kids,” says Antonia. She shepherds Saul into the bedroom. They shut the door. Antonia’s heart has started tapping out a quick jazz on the inside of her rib cage. She and Paolo have attained a tenuous peace. They are polite and gracious toward one another. Paolo promised this morning that he would meet her at their apartment before dinner. He promised they’d take a cab together. He promised she wouldn’t have to shuttle two kids and her own swelled-up self to Sunday dinner by herself. But he never showed. He didn’t answer the phone at his office. And Antonia had to herd Robbie and carry Enzo and ease her aching body into a taxi on her own. She had to choke down a fearful lump, the same one that rises whenever there might be trouble, whenever something might have happened.