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THE NEXT AFTERNOON, a Friday, Giulia got drunk at home with her friend Angela. They had come back from school hoping to hurry through their homework so that in each other’s locked diaries they could copy out and illustrate phrases popular with girls in their class: Best friends are the sisters you choose for yourself (Eustache Deschamps), Forget me not, the little river flower whispers / Forget me not, I too whisper! (Anonymous)

They both had bad colds, blocked noses and painful sinuses, so before getting down to work they decided to make themselves two cups of hot milk with a drop of grappa, the way the grown-ups usually made it for them. The only thing was, they didn’t know how to measure the grappa. It should have been a droplet, but in their hands it became a shot glass. Within ten minutes they were doubled over their notebooks laughing, oblivious to ink smears and instead exhilarated by their increasingly deformed, uneven writing.

They threw themselves on the sofa and Angela decided to pretend to be Martino. Giulia had to give her a proper kiss on the lips, she insisted, and Giulia scoffed and backed away, saliva dribbling from her mouth. The two of them were thin and straight as a rail, so that the bones of their elbows and knees, sternums and pelvises were aligned. When she got home with Corrado, Gemma found them in that state and Corrado enthusiastically threw himself into the mix.

Gemma sniffed the empty cups and wrinkled her nose. The girls’ cheeks were red, ears boiling, and they were wriggling to get away from the little boy’s kicking. Their grandmother came to help them. She extricated Corrado, managed to get his shoes on him, and ordered Giulia and Angela to stand up. They swayed and giggled, explaining in comical drawls that they’d only drunk a little fortified milk as usual. Giulia asked Angela if she saw the pattern on the carpet wriggling like worms. Angela leaned over to examine it, rapt. Seconds later she said yes, she saw it, too, and was so exultant she could hardly refrain from kicking her legs in the air.

Gemma didn’t try to hide the fact that she found it all amusing. She pushed them into the bathroom and washed hands, necks, and faces while the girls cackled, gurgled, and held to the edge of the sink in an effort to stay upright. Since their undershirts were soaking wet by then, she dressed them in some of Giulia’s dry clothes. She made them eat bread and drink a great deal of water and then phoned for Angela’s father to come and get her.

It was the first time since Silvia’s disappearance that something approaching good humor had welled up in Gemma’s chest. She wished she could do Giulia’s homework for her, but she had completed the third year only and still read by mouthing the words; she did her math in a mixed and unorthodox way, by breaking things down and guessing. She got Corrado busy sticking cards and toothpicks onto a corkboard and helped Giulia by scratching her back, shooing away the flies that persisted in settling on her drooping head.