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nightmarish never-ending theme park ride, he flew, gasping hard, his throat burning. He couldn’t catch his breath as he hung in air, suspended, then plummeted down into a free fall, his body tossed by gusts of hellish breath.
    He knew he had only seconds left to live. Louise! Hope, I’ll never see you. Please, God, take care of them. Never again see Louise…My mother…My father…Quick death please! Oh God, please be merciful. Please make it quick .
    Seconds. Only seconds to death. There were four flashes of light as he was hit with flying chunks of concrete, hit by so many things reduced to bits and pieces. There were just four flashes of light and then a single, last bright flash.

CHAPTER SIX
    Nothing but Smoke
     
    “Why did this happen? My son never hurt anyone in his whole life. He’s a good person. He’s never hurt anyone, never killed anyone. He’s a good person. Why would this happen to him?”
    ~ Antonia Buzzelli
     
    In The Fashion Factory, a coat-piecing company in Hoboken, New Jersey, fifty-nine-year-old Antonia Buzzelli sat at her sewing machine, her head bent over the sleeve she was feverishly working into the body of a coat. For thirty years, she’d been doing the same thing, putting parts together, forming coats for women to wear. She knew what it was to have pain in her back after a long day of keeping her face down close to the fabric, her gaze squinted on the thin eye of the sewing needle. She knew what it was to wipe bits of fuzz from her lips, to sneeze when dust from the cloth got into her nose. Antonia knew what it was to look up into bright and bare overhead lights, into a thick haze. Up and down, needle into cloth, then out for another stitch: This went on hour after hour, day after day—a rhythm she was used to, as if it were part of her body. There was always noise: the clattering of her machine, the scraping of feet around her, the Spanish spoken in women’s voices as they worked at their own machines (a language she fought to understand), universally understood laughter, and the jovial sound of friendly conversation. In her head, through the long days, she was free to think, to plan ahead to when she and her husband Ugo would retire.
    It was early yet, only mid-morning, with hours of sewing to go. Antonia’s mind was on later that day, what she would make for Ugo for dinner. Once she’d made that decision, her mind was free to move ahead, to when Pasquale and Louise’s baby would be born. A grandchild! I’ll be a grandmother! The baby will call me “Nonna”! Only a few more months, and her dream would be complete. Her child, her beloved Pasquale, would have a child of his own.
    Antonia lifted a hand to brush her curly brown hair back from her face. She was tired—already tired and already aging. She could feel it in her hands and in her back. She’d once been a beautiful woman. Back when she was a little girl in Bari, Antonia’s mother had said of her that she had a smile that would light up the world. She’d learned that beauty doesn’t truly buy a woman anything. It did, however, afford Antonia the chance to land a man like Ugo in her life and to have a beautiful boy like Pasquale. Maybe that’s more than enough. What, beyond this, does a woman need? When she thought about it, she had nothing to complain about. If anything, she had to thank God for all her blessings.
    Her hands stopped. She snapped the presser foot up and bowed her head. She crossed herself and closed her eyes for just a minute.
     
    ~ ♦ ~
     
    Antonia had come to America from Bari, Italy in 1967. Almost immediately, she’d met Ugo and thought him strong and staunch, a man of great character, a man she could lean on. Back then, they’d lived in adjacent apartment buildings in Hoboken and saw each other often. Before long, he was there, on her stoop, every time she left her building. The beginning of their dating was tentative, for they were both shy. If they’d have been back in Italy, friends would