“Are you back in school?” Luca asked, placing the gin and tonic and a bowl of peanuts on the bar.
I had been working toward a degree in early childhood education, and had even completed two semesters of a program at Marist, but everything had unraveled when I lost another baby, this one five months along, older than the others, developed enough that we knew he’d been a little boy. I couldn’t bear to read about the physical milestones during the first year of a child’s life or the development of language in toddlers when it was becoming more and more clear that I would never have a child of my own. So far, no one, not even Luca, knew how to help me get over that.
“It’s not for school,” I said, meeting his eyes. He poured a pint of IPA for himself, which was unusual: Luca didn’t drink at work. He had realized I needed company and broke with habit to join me. I tipped my glass at him—cheers—and drank the gin down. It felt good, the slow, sure rush of alcohol, the inevitable flood of blood to my brain.
“What is it, then?” Luca asked, looking down at the documents spread over the bar.
“I’m not exactly sure,” I said, taking another long sip of my drink. “It came to the house today.”
“Looks like Italian.” He picked up the envelope and read the flowery Italian names aloud, each one like blossoms on a branch: “Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco. Who the hell is that?”
I shrugged. “I know as much as you do.”
He looked at the return address. “Torino?”
Something surfaced in my mind, a memory rising from an obscure depth. “Didn’t our grandparents come from Turin?”
“They were farther north,” Luca said. “Up in the Alps.”
Our grandparents had been born in the same small village in northern Italy. They had immigrated to New York City after the Second World War, lived in a tight community in Little Italy, and then moved to Milton in the fifties, drawn by backyards and good public schools. Luca and I had grown up in the shadows of this migration—the elaborate Sunday lunches that went on all afternoon, the Catholic school education, the way we looked as though we were part of the same clan. Our heritage was northern Italian, our skin washed pale as a snowdrift, our hair white-blond, and our eyes watered down to the lightest shade of blue. Our ancestry held fast in our genes like the clasp of a fob to a chain, even as our grandparents, then our parents, became Americans.
Despite my shared heritage with Luca, our families had not been close. In fact, I always felt that they had disliked each other, especially the older generation, although I had nothing concrete to back this feeling up. Luca’s paternal grandmother, Nonna Sophia, had never been particularly warm to me, not even at our wedding. When Luca and I took her to church on Sundays, as we used to do before the separation, she never sat near me on the pew, but between her son and grandson, as if I might rub off on her.
“How is Nonna doing, anyway?” I asked, fingering the documents on the bar. Nonna had been born in Italy, and it struck me that she might help me understand the letter.
“Eighty-six and healthy as a horse,” he said, taking a handful of peanuts.
“That woman will outlive all of us,” I said, feeling both admiration and dread.
“She hasn’t been doing very well since the move, actually,” he said. “My dad says her mood is worse than ever.”
Bob and Luca had moved Nonna to a condo at the Monastery, a retirement community on the river, earlier in the year. It had been a big production. Nonna hadn’t wanted to leave her house, but Bob had insisted.
“She doesn’t like it there?”
“Not really. It’s hard to get used to a new environment.” Something in his voice told me he was talking more about himself than his grandmother. “She misses her old life, but she’ll be okay. She’s resilient.”
He met my eyes, and I knew that he was waiting for me to discuss his move back home. He wanted to let everything bad that had happened between us slide away. He wanted to start over.
“I’m working on things,” I said, an edge creeping into my voice that I hadn’t meant to be there. “You know that.”
“I know, I know,” he said, giving me a sweet smile. “But it might be easier with a little help, don’t you think?”
I pushed the papers toward Luca to shift his attention to the problem at hand. “Do you think Nonna would take a look at these for me? Maybe she can tell me what this is all about?”
“She might,” Luca said, glancing again at the papers. He seemed as intrigued as I was about them. “Why don’t you stop by the Monastery and see what she says?”
I bit my lip, wondering if I would regret bringing Nonna into the situation. Things were hard enough between Luca and me without getting his whole family involved. Maybe it was time I solved my own problems, especially now that we were living apart.
“Do you think she’ll be able to understand this?” I asked, but I knew perfectly well that she would understand all of it. The older generation had spoken Italian all the time. My grandparents had been dead for years, but I still remembered the melody of their voices when they spoke their native language.
“I’ll give her a call,” he said. “Let her know you’re coming.”
Two
The Monastery retirement community sat high on a riverbank, an immense brick structure with copper drainpipes, dark windows, and a moss-covered slate roof. Built in the mid-nineteenth century, it had housed Catholic priests until the eighties, when a developer cut it into twenty-two independent living condos, some with river views, others giving onto the woods.
I parked near the entrance and then sat in my car, a wave of anxiety running through me. Nonna was a formidable woman, and I was a little afraid of her, especially because I hadn’t seen her since I’d asked Luca to move out. She hadn’t been crazy about me before—she had always seemed to look down on my family—but now she would have a real reason to hate me.
Bracing myself, I tucked the envelope under my arm and walked up to the reception desk, where a bearded nursing assistant took my name and then led me to Nonna’s apartment.
“There’s someone to see you, Sophia,” he said. He showed me into the room before slipping back into the hallway, leaving me alone with Luca’s tiny, fierce grandmother.
When the battle to relocate Nonna had begun, Bob argued that Nonna would be more comfortable at the Monastery, that it wasn’t as antiseptic or medicalized as the other retirement homes, and it was true: Nonna’s apartment was warm and comfortable, with art on the walls and books piled everywhere. There was a small kitchen, a private bathroom, and a stunning view of the river, its snowy banks blanketed by a thick gray mist. A Christmas tree blinked in the corner, a few presents tucked underneath, and I remembered, suddenly, that it was nearly Christmas. I should have brought a gift. It would have cast this whole thing in a better light.
“Nonna,” I said. She didn’t seem to hear or see me, so I took another step closer. “Is this a good time?”
Nonna, small and frail, a jet-black wig perched on her head like a nest, sat on a sectional sofa near the window, a magnifying glass in one hand, a paperback in the other.