They’re going to lose the house, obviously.
Oh, Cinta knows it; of course Cinta knows it. She’s known it for years, somewhere in the back of her brain’s bargain basement: that the money wasn’t coming in like it used to, that there was no way it could possibly last. She grew up eating margarine sandwiches, her pants always two inches short at the ankles. She can smell lack a mile away.
Still, she thinks, hushing the low whoosh of panic like a child misbehaving in an expensive department store: they’re not going to lose the house tonight, are they?
So. Nothing to worry about, then.
She slathers on her potions—A hundred and fifty dollars an ounce, she can hear Dominic grumbling, but you just go ahead and ask him if he wants to be married to a wrinkled old crone—and slips into a fresh pair of pajamas, pads down the hall toward the stairs. She loves this house, truly, almost as much as she loves to complain about it: its high ceilings and the wide arches of the windows, terra-cotta tile and creamy white paint. She always imagined throwing dinner parties here, the dining room finally full of the right kinds of people: the tinkle of their brilliant conversations. Some proof that she finally belonged.
Well, she thinks again. Not tonight.
In the living room she finds the girls heaped in a Turnpike Pileup, all five of them fast asleep like something out of a fairy tale. Cinta watches them for a moment: the long lines of their calf muscles, their faces smooth and relaxed. Olivia’s hair across June’s shoulder. Kit’s head in Lilly’s lap. Mari is curled on her side, turned away from the others; still, Cinta can’t help but notice, one seeking hand reaches back.
They’ll land on their feet, she thinks in the moment before she forces herself to stop imagining it, heads back up to bed with a mind gone perfectly, peacefully blank: her girls, her dark-eyed wonders, her miracles each and every one. After all, they’re Benedettos. After all, they always do.