From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(77)

I thought she was going to ask how Zoela was doing in school. But she was fast-tracking the practical matters. There’d be time to talk about reading, writing, and arithmetic.

“Mi arrangio,” I said. “I manage.”

It was true, I was managing. My financial stability depended on a steady stream of new acting work; residuals from old jobs; the remainder of Saro’s small life insurance policy, which I used for large unexpected expenses and inevitable employment downturns; and finally, the reduction of his medical debt. It was a high-wire act, no doubt. But I had seen myself through worse. We still had our house, I could still send Zoela to the same school. We had not suffered the secondary losses that so many widowed families do. I counted my blessings. I crossed my fingers.

Then I asked her how she got by. “I keep the lights off. I reuse what I can.” It was true. She kept only two bulbs in the six-bulb light fixture that hung above her bed. “I have to save for when Franca will need help taking care of me.” She was practical to the bone.

Then we joked about how my being with her in Sicily during the summer actually saved me the cost of Los Angeles summer camps and offset the daily carrying costs of life in L.A. At the end of our time on the bench, we had gone so far as to agree to enroll Zoela in the town’s half-day kid camp. She could socialize with kids when she wasn’t running in the streets with her bestie, Rosalia. The enrollment fee for the entire month of July was a total of 15 euros, or $18.00. I could spend more than that in a single afternoon of snacks at Starbucks.

“Here there’s nothing to spend. We have food, we have shelter, you don’t need a car.” She said it so convincingly that for a nanosecond, I considered dropping off the grid; homeschooling Zoela; donning a kitchen smock; and getting my annual checkups compliments of the Italian government.

Then she asked me about my plans for the upcoming weeks of our visit.

“Well, at the end of the month, for my birthday, my parents will be coming to visit.” I had mentioned a while ago that they might come, and now it was confirmed.

“Good. Then they will get to see the town feast!” She said it with such enthusiasm.

On the second anniversary of Saro’s death, my dad had told Zoela that he would see her in Sicily one day. It had been another emotional milestone, especially for Zoela. Getting older for her meant more life being lived without her father; each year she remembered a little less, and it pained her. That day all my parents had come to visit me, and we had gone to the cemetery in Los Angeles. Attica had read a poem she had written for the occasion. Zoela had laid flowers and danced around in circles with her cousin. I told her to let her instincts lead the way. Dancing was a way of releasing energy and physicalizing what she couldn’t say. In that intimate group, we had found people who could hold space for us as time went on. All touched the memorial tablet and said a silent prayer, and later my dad told Zoela he would come visit her in her grandmother’s home. She had never had those grandparents in the same room together. The last time they had all gotten together was two years before Zoela had come into our lives.

Now it was happening. My dad and Aubrey would arrive on the day of the festival of the town’s patron saint, my birthday.

Nonna hadn’t seen them since her trip to Houston more than a decade before. “I have the house at the edge of town ready for them. Does your dad still like sausage?”

“Maybe even more,” I quipped.

She told me the plan was that they would stay across town at Saro’s aunt’s house, the same aunt who resided in Switzerland, who had come to our wedding, and whose husband had waved a napkin in the air with my relatives to Aretha Franklin’s “Natural Woman” at our wedding. Her husband had since passed away, but not before building a house in Aliminusa where they were supposed to have retired. It sat empty at the end of town, save twice a year, when she came down by train in the fall for the olive harvest and again in the summer for Ferragosto, the national Italian holiday on August 15, when half of Italy shuts down and goes to the sea.

“I hope it is not too simple for them, but it’s got a cross breeze and it’s quiet,” she said.

“It will be perfect. They will love it. Thank you.”

Excited and moved by the thought of our families connecting once again, I left her at the table and went upstairs to wake Zoela. We had roughly a month of mornings to enjoy being with Nonna. I didn’t want her to miss even one.





THE PROCESSION




Three days into our trip, I prepared myself to head to the edge of town, to a place where il silenzio parla col vento e ti porta ricordi—silence converses with the wind and brings memory. Outside Nonna’s house, a sparrow drank water from the topsoil of basil potted in crumbling terra-cotta. The leather-faced fishmonger drove away, a swordfish’s spear pointing west out of the back of his wagon. I lingered at the kitchen table.

I had not been to the town cemetery in a year. This year I was starting a new tradition: taking a stone with me each time I went. Back in Los Angeles, I had come across Carlo Levi’s Words Are Stones: Impressions of Sicily, a book on Sicily and the indomitable spirit of everyday people all over the island. Saro had it in his collection of books in our living room. The title reminded me that when Zoela was a toddler, Saro had passed time on the beach with her looking for stones. Ones shaped like hearts, one shaped like Sicily itself. In the years since his death, she had done that on her own at beaches everywhere. The previous summer in Sicily, she had found a heart-shaped stone and written “I love you” on it. Then I had taken it to the cemetery on her behalf. Now I wanted to take a new stone, and I imagined that in time, with many visits, there would be a collection—a little like the Jewish tradition of taking stones to the grave of a loved one. I was sure I would find one along the road on the way to the outskirts of town.