have stared at it for hours.”
“That’s something, I guess,” Gina gave her sister a sympathetic look.
“Do you remember the box of letters I told you about? The ones Mom gave me the day of the accident?”
“Yeah.”
“I read part of the first one last night. It was amazing reading words written from Papa to Nonna, knowing it was from such a long time ago. How much life happens and then. . . gone.”
Gina glanced at Juliette again, not at all sure her sister was coping. She sometimes worried that Juliette’s neck and shoulder muscles had become completely rigid from the tension in her body since the accident.
“Do you mind if I keep them?” Juliette asked.
“The letters? Not at all. My Italian’s horrible anyway, but let me know if you discover anything juicy,” she smiled, thinking of their grandparents.
“Mom said it’s mostly between Nonna and a friend of hers.”
“Maybe Nonna was leading a double life. Or was a spy during World War I.”
“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Juliette said.
Gina frowned again at Juliette’s lost look and asked, “Why are you biting your thumbnail and staring into space?”
“I’m just having a thought,” she answered, thinking about the plane ticket tucked inside the box of letters.
Before Juliette told her family about her plans, she enrolled in the Italian cooking class she’d been coveting for ages so she had a justifiable reason to leave. She knew that would help convince her dad and sister that she would be all right and that she wasn’t truly going off the deep end. It would give her days an anchor. She knew they’d been worried about her. They were convinced she was still in shock and Juliette guessed they were right, but whether she was or wasn’t didn’t make a difference as far as she could tell. It was simply a label; but what did it mean from a practical standpoint? It’s not like she could jumpstart herself into feeling normal again. Nothing could bring her mother back.
At home she couldn’t sleep because when she closed her eyes she could see the car coming and feel the same horrifying sensation of being rooted in place, watching it happen. She would turn, wanting to react, but would be frozen while the car careened toward her mother again and again. She saw the impact over and over. She hated being able to remember what was on display in the store, as if her mind cemented those details in place while she simultaneously saw her mother being hit by the car, flung at the window, and finally land on the ground.
So she’d decided to flee from the sympathetic eyes of her friends and family, her in-law studio, the catering job she hated anyway, and enrolled in a cooking class in Italy to get some breathing room. If she could breathe again, and sleep, she thought maybe she could come to terms with what had happened.
Now, weeks later, while Juliette was still mourning the loss of her mom, the ring rested on the middle finger of her right hand as she swung open the heavy black door to the flat she’d rented in Lucca, Italy. Juliette had decided to wear it always as a symbol of strength and perseverance. She thought her nonna, who was the first to wear it, would have wanted it that way. She subconsciously twirled it for strength as she peeked through the open door. She was exhausted as she dragged her heavy suitcase inside and looked around the tiny apartment she’d be calling home for the next six months.
Juliette stepped over the suitcase and let her eyes adjust to the interior light of her subleased apartment. It was dimmer than outside, but sunbeams streamed through a window that opened out onto a metal balcony spilling over with scarlet geraniums. She walked in further and was relieved to see that the apartment was more than fine. It had a tiny kitchen with a two-burner stove that would probably be deemed an illegal fire hazard at home, but seemed a perfect fit here. The bathroom was miniscule and entirely covered—including the floor and ceiling—in orange seventies-era tile, and the showerhead stuck out of the side wall with no enclosure, but she didn’t care.
The wooden floors of the main room were laid in a traditional herringbone pattern and the walls were an off-white plaster with photographs of the surrounding sights. Thankfully there were no bugs in sight. The furnishings consisted of a small, round, dark-gray marble table with two black-painted wooden chairs by the window, a red linen sofa and a tall, beautiful, dark-chocolate colored armoire that made the room look richly furnished, in spite of its small size.
The armoire was exactly the type of piece her mom would have loved. She sighed, running her hand along the smooth wood. When she tried to open it, she realized it had a false front. What looked like drawers at the bottom and cupboard doors at the top was actually one large door that pulled open and inside was a Murphy-style pull-down bed.
Tucked onto shelves at the top of the armoire were sheets and a heavy down duvet with a plain white linen cover that smelled of lilac and starch. The fluffy down was thicker than she had ever encountered at home and the thought of snuggling under it was exactly what she wanted to do in her travel-weary, emotionally-exhausted state.
She liked the look of the apartment. It would be a cozy place for her for the next half year, where she could avoid soothing words and pep talks.
She went back down the steep stone staircase and brought up two smaller suitcases, dropped them in the middle of the room, pulled down the bed, made it, flopped down in her clothes, and was asleep instantly and dreamlessly for the first time in the seven weeks since the accident.
She awoke, disoriented, to the sound of Italian being shouted outside her window and the realization that she was starving. The angle of the sun told her she’d slept for hours and it was now afternoon. She sat up and looked at the clock, then kicked off the covers, threw her clothes into the corner, and took a long, hot shower.
While she shampooed her hair, she did a quick calculation and realized that because of traveling and the time change, she had skipped breakfast and lunch altogether and was now way overdue for a meal. She remembered the pastry she’d eaten half of at the train station, which she could finish now to tide her over, but she wanted some real food and soon. She had seen an open-air market in the main piazza from the taxi window on her way from the train station to her apartment and hoped the vendors were still open.
She would need to set up her kitchen and make dinner, so once she was out of the shower and dressed, she used the back of her train ticket to scratch out a grocery list of milk, tea, coffee, garlic, thyme, artichokes, cheese, wine, and bread among other essentials.
She quickly dried her hair, then threw it into a ponytail and ventured out to stock her kitchen. She thought she might even pick up some flowers to make it cheerful inside. She meandered back to the market she’d seen with only two wrong turns, which for the directionally-challenged Juliette was a triumph. As she walked under the stone arch that formed the entrance, she noticed that the piazza she’d spied was not the main “square” at all, but a circle. It was surrounded by shops and restaurants, strewn with parked bicycles here and there, and hosted a large farmer’s market, which was the perfect place to begin. It was good to be someplace altogether different where she could focus on new sights and sounds instead of on her sadness and unbridled fury at both the out-of-control driver and herself.
CATARINA, HER FIRST DECISION AND HER SECOND DECISION
Catarina hefted her heavy, brown, chipped, ceramic water jug and scooted it along towards the well. Hers was just one in a short line of vessels waiting to be filled at the pump. She, Anna, and Maria Nina got their best gossiping done while they waited to fill their families’ water urns with the rest of the women in the village, who managed to pump water and visit with their closest friends at the same time. On hot summer days, they fanned themselves while they sweltered and chatted, and in the cold of winter they—wrapped in shawls, thin cloth coats and hand-knitted sweaters—exchanged confidences while extracting the water their families needed from the old, creaky pump.
“My