The Family(59)
“Yes, certainly,” says Sofia. “I know how much he values you.”
“You can’t just value someone, though,” says Detective Leo. “You have to compensate them accordingly. You have to show them.”
“I know my father knows that,” says Sofia. “I think he’s just doing what he can to take care of his family, and the families of everyone who works for him. He makes it seem easy, but it’s a lot of responsibility.”
“I understand that,” says Leo. “When my precinct reorganized—well. I understand being saddled with responsibility over other people.”
“I can tell,” says Sofia.
“Joey Colicchio really is an honorable man,” Leo says, and for the first time in her adult life, Sofia can see a road stretched out in front of her, a path she wants to take. This is the right thing for me, she thinks, and she is so grateful she almost weeps at the table. This is what I’m supposed to do.
* * *
—
When Sofia returns home and Saul asks, how was it? she turns to him with light in her eyes and says, it was easy.
And she expects to fall sound asleep that night, but she finds herself staring at the midnight ceiling, and she cannot figure out what is keeping her awake. Was it Leo’s face as they said goodbye, how he turned and scratched his head, so like Saul when he grapples with something wordless and gnarled? Was it Saul himself, who has only half-looked at her for days, who is gripped by a melancholy Sofia doesn’t recognize, and wouldn’t have expected, given that the war is over?
Sometime before she drifts off, Sofia remembers a school courtyard, and holding Antonia’s hand. A cluster of girls on the other side of the windswept swingset and Sofia could tell they were all talking about her. Your father is a murderer, Maria Panzini said, matter-of-factly, as they waited in line to go back inside. Ice like concrete in Sofia’s belly. Even in grade school, she had harbored some unspeakable desire to be better than the people around her. Has she succeeded now? Does she understand the price she’ll pay? It was easy, her own voice echoes. It was like it was made for her.
Next to Sofia, Saul feigns sleep. For hours, he stares with half-mast eyes at the ticking clock.
* * *
—
At dinner on Sunday Joey raises a toast to Sofia and everyone cheers, Antonia and Paolo and Frankie, Pops, who is repeating stories lately and who might not understand what he is toasting, and even hawkeyed Nonna, even Rosa gives a tight smile, and Rosa’s brother nods and Marco DeLuca and two other interchangeable new guys raise their glasses but look at Joey the whole time, instead of at Sofia. “Welcome,” Joey says, warmly, and Sofia is too busy avoiding Antonia’s eyes to notice that Joey is avoiding Rosa’s, but Rosa finds Sofia washing dishes after dinner and begins to berate her with the fierceness of a thousand mammas: Gussied up like you’re for sale, this is disgraceful. You have a husband and a daughter, Sofia, what will Julia think, how will she grow up? And Sofia, for the first time in her life, wants something more than she wants to argue with Rosa, and so she kisses her mamma and she says, I’ll be careful, Julia will be fine, and she leaves Rosa sputtering in this kitchen, torn, as Rosa often is, between pride and horror.
The job becomes a part of her so that soon Sofia cannot ever remember not wanting it. She points her whole being toward the horizon of it, the glory of stepping out of the house and being seen.
While Saul is working late Julia is often at Antonia’s house. This started as a way for Sofia to avoid talking to Rosa about her job, but it has become habit, lifeline. Sometimes Sofia comes with her, to stay up with Antonia past bedtime, conversation like a low sonata on the couch. Sometimes Sofia is elsewhere. When Sofia shuts the door to Antonia’s house and walks away, she feels relief and joy and an anticipation that crawls like static under her skin. She does not think about Antonia, whose slightly pressed lips have been a moral barometer since Sofia learned to talk. She does not usually think about Julia. Your Child, people say to her, constantly, as though because Sofia Has A Child she has relinquished all claim to agency, as though Sofia needs reminding that the top of Julia’s head smells like warm bread, as though Sofia isn’t a better mother now, a fucking lioness. My Child will never be made to feel guilty for existing the way she wants to, Sofia thinks. And so she parents: when Julia wants to eat leftover pastry for breakfast, spongey cakes with chocolate ganache, thick cognac cream, Sofia opens the box and eats, too, with her hands. When Julia wants to skip her bath and crawl under her sheets with dirty feet and tangled hair, Sofia tucks her in. So what, she says to Rosa. She’s fine, she says to Antonia, who finds an excuse to make bath time a part of any day Julia spends there.
Mostly, Sofia is a middleman; a calming draft prescribed to men who work for the Family when they begin to get nervous. This is something new Joey is trying. He imagines Carlo, and how things might have changed if Carlo could talk to a woman, someone young and professional and pretty who showed him how his job was connected to family, to the earth, without ever directly mentioning those things. Sometimes having a woman in the room can exacerbate tension. But there are many moments when Sofia can put a jumpy man at ease without saying a word.
Sofia doesn’t mind. She is good at this—so good any objections she might have conceived of, objections to being used like a decoration, like the breathing equivalent of a stiff drink, fall to the wayside. She bursts out of bed each morning. When she gets home from her dinners, her drinks, her cappuccino-turned-glass-of-wine, she is bright-eyed and babbling, talking to Saul in tones loud enough to wake Julia, enamored with herself. I changed him, she thinks, she tells Saul, she whispers to herself in the bathroom mirror. I made him different. She doesn’t think about whether she is changing men for the better, or in service of a mission she believes in. It is enough for Sofia that each man’s intention appears to bend and shift as she speaks and moves. At the beginning of 1946 Joey pours her a glass of port and tells her he’s going to have her start taking different meetings, and so when Sofia is not charming flighty Family men and nervous detectives, she is supervising shipments of wine, vinegar, aged and crumbling cheeses, and she is learning to set her mouth so no one asks her questions or gives her any shit, and she is feeling, each day, more and more powerful, more and more connected to the internal beating, not just of her own heart, but of the entire changing world.