From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(59)

When I went inside to join the Gullo clan, the first thing I saw was Croce and Giuseppe wandering around our home, touching the handrails along the stairs, opening the fridge, looking at the fountain in the atrium. Giuseppe tapped the copper-pipe railing that led upstairs. He stuck his face into the dryer. Croce took her shoes off and sunk her stockinged feet into the carpet.

By the time I took them upstairs to the guest bedroom, it was obvious that they were proud. Not because the house was particularly big or opulent in any way. It didn’t matter that the beds still didn’t have frames or that we had Ikea side tables. It was their son’s house, something he had managed to own as an immigrant in a country that they themselves had found overwhelming and inhospitable.

When I suggested that they should rest after more than twenty hours of travel, they balked.

“Abbiamo portato da mangiare—We brought food,” they said in unison. “We need to unpack it.”

Within a matter of minutes, two of their three suitcases were open in the hallway upstairs, and they began arguing over what to make for dinner from the fresh produce they had brought.

Then Giuseppe took off his homemade money belt, an old undershirt Croce had stitched with muslin and fashioned with a draw tie. I could see a stack of euros inside, enough for a monthlong stay. That kind of money was the result of years of harvests, years of savings. He handled the money belt carefully, resting it on the floor so that he could freely unpack the food, unencumbered. Then we went downstairs to where Saro was waiting, still unable to navigate stairs unassisted.

“Passami il cibo—Pass me the food,” he yelled up to his mother.

Over the railing, Croce handed him eggplant, winter cardoons, a string of braided garlic, and artichoke bulbs for planting followed by bottles of tomato sauce, a two-gallon tin of olive oil, jars of marinated artichoke hearts, a small wheel of cheese, dried oregano, and plastic bags containing chamomile flowers still on the stalk and bundled with a tie.

I learned two things about them in that moment. One, that my in-laws were wholly unaware of the fact that transporting fresh produce into the United States was illegal. I was shocked, staring at a suitcase full of food directly from the fields of Sicily. How they had gotten bulbs of garlic, winter greens, and cheese through customs, I will never know. And two, that they had no faith in American grocery stores. If they were going to a foreign country, they wanted to bring what they knew: good olive oil, tomato sauce, caponata, garlic they had grown with their own hands.

I helped the process along by taking the remaining items down to Saro. I was ready to laugh with him about how absurd it all was. Instead, he met my sarcastic smile with genuine excitement. “Bellissimo! Facciamo una pasta?—Beautiful! Shall we make pasta?”

It was nearly 10:00 p.m.

Half an hour later, Saro was talking to his father in the living room and I was showing my mother-in-law around our tiny kitchen. I shoved cardoons with the roots still intact into the lettuce crisper alongside my California rolls.

She started cooking that night and didn’t stop for the next month. The house always smelled of something simmering, sautéeing, or frying. Once again it had the familiar noises of clattering dishes, flames clicking into action, the opening and closing of the oven door. Croce seemed happy to do it. It gave her purpose each day.

We got Italian stations on satellite TV for Giuseppe, and when he wasn’t yelling at then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi on the screen, I was tasked with entertaining him on trips to Home Depot. He walked the aisles, marveling at all the choices, American surplus on display. He wanted me to translate everything from drills to drains to screen doors.

After a week, it was clear that I was to be Giuseppe’s bread runner. I taxied him to the store each day for daily loaves. After a week of going there twice a day, as he would have if he had been in Sicily, I was exhausted. I had a husband at home who was still going to regular doctor appointments and still taking powerful drugs to help repair his immune system and promote bone growth before starting chemotherapy all over again. I had in-laws who didn’t drive or speak English. They had no interest in museums or restaurants or retail stores. They wanted to be with their son. They wanted bread. They wanted to make sure their love stood guard over cancer.

One night, as Croce and I cleaned the kitchen while Saro rested and his father watched television, Croce asked me, “What do the doctors say?” Her voice was gravelly and full of tamped-down emotion.

“They don’t give definitive answers, but so far he has responded well. Some people have years with no recurrences,” I responded.

“But it comes back?” she asked, abandoning Italian and speaking to me in Sicilian. I hated the question. To answer it, I’d have to reveal the reality of the worst possible outcome.

“I don’t know,” I responded in Italian.

“Saro would have more to live for if there were children,” Croce said almost under her breath. I nearly dropped the plate I was drying, struck as I was with shock. Her words had hit like a gut punch in the place I was most vulnerable. How dare she? What does she know? We were fighting for life, and we had preserved the possibility of a future life with kids. But I didn’t have the words, energy, or desire to express all that. Even in that moment, I knew her statement, typical of a concerned Sicilian mother, was not meant as a rebuke of me as a woman, as a wife. Still, it made me feel that I had failed Saro. I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream. More than anything, though, I wanted her and Giuseppe gone. I left the plate on the counter and went up to my room, shut the door, crawled into bed, and didn’t speak to anyone until the next morning.