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.
Anything, Antonia knows, could happen. She feels stupid to have forgotten that. The moment you stop worrying is the moment trouble begins.
And if there is trouble, she wants to look Paolo in the eyes while he tells her. Antonia expands outside herself, feeling out for her family, counting Robbie with Julia in her room, Enzo with his half-mast sleepy eyes in Sofia’s arms. Robbie and Enzo are here. Where is Paolo. The beat inside Antonia’s body quickens.
Antonia takes Enzo from Sofia and slips out of the bedroom to get ice and Saul sits heavily on his bed. Sofia kneels on the floor in front of him to look at his face and says in a low voice, “Tell me what happened.”
And Saul raises his eyes to meet Sofia’s and says, “I can’t.”
Sofia laughs. Her husband has come home bleeding and beaten. He will tell her why. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Sofia’s hands are framing the sides of Saul’s face. Saul reaches up to cover them with his own, which are crusted with dried smears of black blood. “I love you,” he says.
Sofia begins to heat up. Frustration and disbelief knot at her temples and her vision shadows. “Don’t patronize me,” she says through gritted teeth. “Tell me what happened, Saul, why won’t you tell me?” God, it feels so good to be angry. There is fear licking like a small flame at Sofia’s heart and there is a yet-unnamed apprehension racing around the room and Sofia stands and she lets it all be flattened by the avalanche of her anger. “What the fuck happened to you, Saul?”
“Sofia, Sofia,” says Antonia. She has slipped into the room without Sofia noticing. “The kids.”
“I have to get cleaned up,” says Saul. He stands and flexes his hands. “I promise, I’m fine.” He unbuttons the top button of his shirt and opens the bedroom door. “Everything is going to be okay.”
Sofia and Antonia sit on Sofia’s bed until they hear the shower run.
“It will be okay,” Antonia says. She repeats it to herself. It will be okay.
“It already isn’t,” says Sofia. Antonia and Sofia look at one another solemnly, two girls playing dress-up in the skins of women. “Did you see him? That wouldn’t have happened if everything was okay.”
Does Antonia have a half-formed memory of Carlo, stepping down the creaky inn hall on the night he disappeared, stopping to lift the sweaty curls from her face as she slept? Does she hold it somewhere wordless, as the moment her own fallibility became inescapable? There is nothing that cannot fall apart.
She holds Sofia’s hand. “It will be. It will.”
* * *
—
Saul lets the bathroom fill with steam and sits on the toilet, fully clothed.
It was only two days ago that he went to his Fianzo meeting. It feels like ten years. Saul’s thoughts scatter. Solutions appear and then dissipate like mirages.
Saul stands to undress. He steels himself: he cannot tell Sofia what happened. He has to face the family at dinner. He is scared: a fear that skips his brain and moves straight into his body and blood. Trembling the muscles, tightening the breath.
* * *
—
Paolo doesn’t show for dinner. Antonia sits where she can watch the doorway, which yawns open as each neighbor, each Uncle, arrives. Each time someone who is not Paolo walks in, Antonia feels a vise squeezing her heart tighter and tighter. Where’s Paolo? asks Rosa. Oh, he got caught up, says Antonia. I’m sorry. Rosa knows she is lying; Rosa wraps an arm around Antonia’s shoulders and squeezes; Rosa smells like flour and jasmine, like orange rinds and parsley, and Antonia would like to curl up in her lap and be rocked to sleep. Instead she smiles and says thank you, thank you, as one by one people come to stroke Enzo’s cheeks, to smile at him, to lean with their breath and their overflowing blessings too close to Antonia, too close to her until she feels she might explode. She might scream.
She stays quiet. She says, thank you.