NINA

In strangolagalli, you lose a man in your family that’s it, you wear black the rest of your life. I have a great-aunt over there still in mourning; her husband died in 1944.

Sandro says this’ll kill one or both of them, meaning the Monteleones. He thinks they’re gonna go to pieces. I tell him maybe the husband. Maybe Tommy Senior. As for Lucia, are you kidding? She’s the kind of woman, if there were no fronts on her kitchen cabinets, her kitchen would still look neat.

I was thirteen when my father died. He died in August in a heat wave. We sat under the grape arbor he built in the backyard and received the family. One of us had to keep running around the front to get the people arriving, because our doorbell didn’t work.

It was the kinda bell you couldn’t hear when you rang it, so you didn’t know if it was broken and you should knock, or if you should wait to see if anybody came, or what.

My mother was in black. It was so hot the asphalt was soft, and she had a black sweater on. I remember flies around her head. She watched us kids play in the tomatoes. It was so hot in there among the stalks you could hardly breathe. And you got the pesticide powder from the leaves all over your hands.

The family gathered around the big cement table, and she sat off by herself. Everyone paid their respects, but nobody wanted to crowd her.

She dabbed at the top of her forehead with a napkin. She watched people come and go. She asked how we could play so hard in the heat, and made us come out of the tomatoes and sit in the shade. She said we were pazza. With her dialect it sounded like pots. She said even the animals knew better.

The grapes were in, and we ate them off the vine while we sat there. You had to be careful in the big clusters for spiders.

My sister squeezed the skins so that the centers would pop out. Then she ate just the skins.

What I never told anyone was that the week my father died I dreamt he was asking me to go get medicine for him—he couldn’t get out of bed—and I wouldn’t. And he looked at my face like he knew that I would’ve gone for my mother.

That was my secret while I sat and ate the grapes.

Poor Lucia. Perry she was proud of, but Tommy—you know. Tommy was the first.

How do we get used to this? That’s the secret. How do we do it?

My mother thought here in America the big problems were always just about to get worked out. Polio, TB, influenza, bad roads, prejudice. Someone was off somewhere making new medicines, working out the answers. Our job was to sit tight and hope it happened in time. God protected babies, drunks, and the United States.

In bad times, like when my younger sister got sick with the influenza that killed my baby brother in Italy, my mother would sit in her chair in the kitchen and close her eyes and name the villages surrounding Strangolagalli. Bovile, Ciprano, Monte San Giovanni, she would describe them to herself. We’d tiptoe around the house while she talked about orchards, terraces, and fountains.

When my father died, we waited for her to do that, and she didn’t.

She was spotty about Mass afterwards. When the priest would finally see us, he’d take us aside to see if we were okay. What were we going to say?

I was there when he finally cornered her. She’d managed to avoid him for a little while. He told her something about God’s will, and she quoted back to him an old Calabrian saying: that God was in charge of everything, but the devil was in charge of the timing.