One Italian Summer(32)

Our first course arrives. It’s a plate with fresh-cut tomatoes, peppers marinated in olive oil, and the freshest farmer cheese I’ve ever seen. It oozes cream, like blood, onto the plate. Warm breads are set down in a basket next to our wine.

Carol rubs her hands together. “Yum,” she says. “Here, give me your plate. Have you ever had burrata?”

I hand it over, and she serves me vegetables and cheese. As she’s handing it back another bowl is set down with greens tossed in what looks to be a mustardy vinaigrette.

“This is amazing.”

“Just wait,” Carol says. “This isn’t even the appetizer.”

I spear a piece of tomato. It’s perfect. Sweet and salty, and I don’t even think it has a thing on it. The cheese is sublime.

“Ohmygod.”

Carol nods. “So good,” she says.

“You were right.”

She winks at me, and it stops me, my wine suspended in my hand in midair. It’s something my mother has done for years, that wink. That acknowledgment that says without words: I know I’m right, I’m glad you’ve come around.

“My dad was big into food,” Carol says. “He loved to cook and eat. He’d bake, too, which was unheard of for a man of his generation. He used to make the best hamantaschen. All my friends would come over and demand some.” She laughs.

“You take after him,” I say.

She smiles. “I guess I do.”

Course after course is served to us. Pasta with ramp pesto, grilled whitefish, braised pork shoulder, lasagna with fresh ricotta and basil leaves that are the size of dinosaur kale. It’s all sublime. By the time they bring out the second pasta course—butter and thyme—I feel like my stomach is going to burst right open.

“This meal is trying to kill me,” I say to Carol.

“I know,” she says. “But what a way to go.” She pauses, refills our glasses. “I haven’t even asked what you do for work.”

“I’m a copywriter,” I say. “Or I was.”

People always asked me if I wanted to be a “real” writer, and the truth was, not really. It seemed like the kind of thing other people were. Novelists, poets, screenwriters. Even in a town full of them, it still was someone else’s destiny.

I helped other people write. I took their businesses and blogs and spun them into narratives. I took their words and arranged them in a way that told a story. Their story.

“I enjoy it,” I say. “There is something satisfying about helping someone distill their message.”

Carol listens with patience and concern. “I can see that. It’s sort of the same with design.”

“To be frank, I’m not sure I really know what I want to be in the long term. Seeing you talk about design, the way you feel about it, your vision… I’m not sure I have that.”

“A passion?”

I nod.

Carol considers this. “Not everyone does. Not everyone needs one. What do you enjoy?”

I think about Saturday afternoons spent arranging flowers, picking tomatoes in her garden, long lunches. “Family,” I say.

Carol smiles. “What a wonderful answer.”

“I took a leave of absence about two months ago,” I tell her. “From my job, I mean, I don’t know whether to go back, or if I can, even.”

“How come?” Carol asks. “Why did you leave?”

I study the wine in my glass. I can’t begin to calculate how many times it’s been refilled over the past two hours. My words are loose.

“I lost someone I love,” I tell her. “And I couldn’t really find my way to keeping my life like it was before she was gone.” I lift my eyes up to meet hers.

Carol looks at me a long moment, and then she turns her head to gaze out over the water. The sky is fading—that familiar haze of golden, warm light bathing the city in a hue only Italy knows.

“I understand that,” she says. “Life doesn’t always turn out the way we think it’s going to, does it? I understand that,” she repeats.

“Your mother,” I say. “What was she like?”

Carol looks back to me. “She was wonderful,” she says. “A total firecracker. She had an opinion about everything and could drink any man under the table. That’s what my father says. She’s been gone so long sometimes it’s hard to remember her. I was only twelve.”

“I’m so very sorry.”

“Thank you.” She looks at me a long moment. Time seems to hover, and I want to ask her something else, something about what she did, how she got by, to offer up my own grief here, too, but instead what comes out is:

“I’m married.”

Carol blinks hard.

“Or I was. Am? That’s part of it. Eric, that’s his name. I told him I was going to Italy, and I wasn’t sure if I was coming back to him.”

Carol’s eyes get big. “Wow,” she says, but that’s it. She doesn’t offer anything after, so I continue.

“We got married so young,” I tell her. “He was my first and only serious boyfriend. And lately, I don’t know. I’m starting to feel like he was there and it just happened and it wasn’t based in anything. Like I didn’t choose it. I loved him. I do, love him. I don’t even know what I am saying, or what I am feeling, only that I got to a point where I just couldn’t keep going as we had been, I had to—”