For the past couple of years, I’d been writing stories about my father’s village and our trip back to Supino with him. I wasn’t sure whether anyone outside of our family would be interested in our experience, but I had an agent and she was trying to find a publisher. She phoned me in Toronto on an August evening when Bob was going to the corner store to buy a newspaper and I was about to kiss him goodbye at the door. My agent said, “Your book’s been picked up by a publisher here on the West Coast. Their editor will be in touch with you next week.” I grabbed Bob’s hands and we jumped up and down in the kitchen like a couple of kids.

“I want to phone everyone I know and tell them the news,” I said.

“Go ahead,” said Bob. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” And he went off to buy the newspaper.

I picked up the phone. I talked to people, I left messages, and I didn’t get tired of repeating the news. I phoned a friend who was on holiday in Sweden and the phone rang and rang before someone answered. I’d forgotten about the time difference and had woken my friend as well as the family she was staying with, but we didn’t care. We were that happy. Bob returned with the newspaper and a box of chocolate-covered maraschino cherries.

It took a few days for the news to really settle in and eventually I ran out of people to tell. I started telling strangers: the man who fixed my computer, the clerk at the post office, the waitress, and the dry cleaner. The contracts arrived, but I was too excited to concentrate. Bob read them for me. Then I picked a time when Bob and Kathryn and I were all at the coffee company and I called my agent on one line and my brother and sister on the other lines so we could all be together while I signed the contract. Afterwards we went out for dinner and sat on the patio of our favourite restaurant, eating pizza, drinking wine, and pretending we were in Supino.

We were unwrapping those little candies they give you at the end of your meal along with your bill when Kathryn said, “Dad, I think that bump on your cheek is getting bigger. Maybe you should have the doctor take a look at it.”

Bob never went to the doctor because he was never sick. He agreed it was important to have annual physicals, but he never found the time. He wouldn’t have found the time to make an appointment for this either, so I made it for him. Our family doctor agreed with Bob, he didn’t think it was anything, a lump that had always been there. Still, he sent Bob to a specialist and the specialist was stumped too and made an appointment for Bob to see another specialist downtown. Bob, who rarely complained, began to grumble about the amount of time he spent waiting in doctors’ offices for nothing.

“Okay,” I said, “just keep this last appointment and then we’ll forget about it.”

He came home so late that night that we’d already eaten dinner. I pulled his aluminum-foil-covered plate from the oven and we sat at the table. The kitchen curtain was still open because I’d been watching for his car in the driveway and the sky was black. No stars, no moonlight. The night looked more like a gloomy January evening than an evening in early autumn, and Bob looked tired.

“Traffic was heavy,” he said.

“What’d the doctor say?” I asked.

Bob moved his eyes toward Kathryn. “How was class today?” he asked.

“Good. What’d the doctor say?” said Kathryn.

“It’s just like I said. Nothing. They’re going to take a sample of fluid from the lump and send it to the lab. Did you buy your university parking pass today?”

“When are they taking the sample?” said Kathryn.

“No hurry,” said Bob. “Next month.”

Bob was sitting on the edge of the bed when he told me the rest of the story. The doctor had tried to take the fluid sample in the office. He had a long needle and said Bob would only feel a quick prick before he drew out the liquid. “He tried to prick the lump and couldn’t,” Bob said. “He jabbed again and I honestly thought I was going to pass out. That’s when he decided I needed to see a different specialist. I said, ‘What if I do nothing? Just leave well enough alone?’ The doctor said he didn’t recommend it.”

“What is he recommending?”

“A biopsy.”

The specialist’s secretary called the next day with the booking. She said it was a day surgery and Bob would be in and out in a few hours. The specialist would remove the lump and take a look at it under the microscope. I wrote all of this down and passed Bob the note when he got home.

“Don’t tell the kids,” he said. “I don’t want them to worry.”

“I’m worried.”

“It’s nothing.”

The surgery was booked for the morning of the third Thursday in November. I decided not to think of it as surgery, instead pretending the procedure was just a way to make the patient more comfortable while the doctor cut out some tissue for testing. Like freezing a patient’s mouth when a dentist removes a tooth. I sat at the hospital with Bob, waiting for the call to the surgical unit. I kept getting up to pace a little before returning to the plastic chairs. Bob was playing with his wedding band, twisting it around and around.

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “It’ll turn out to be nothing.”

“I’ve been asking myself, ‘What’s the worst they can say?’ I don’t want to wake up and hear the doctor say, ‘It’s cancer.’”

“You won’t.”

And I was right. While Bob was in post-op, the surgeon had come out still dressed in his scrubs to give me the diagnosis, and then he was back in surgery, operating on the next patient, and I was the one who’d have to say it. I was sitting beside Bob when he woke up. He smiled when he opened his eyes and saw me. “I don’t have anything on under this gown, you know,” he said, grinning.

“It’s cancer,” I told him.

He closed his eyes. “I’m going to go back to sleep for a while.”

I went down the hall to the waiting room and phoned my brother. “I’m at the hospital with Bob. No, nothing’s wrong. It’s just that he had a lump removed from his cheek and it turns out it’s cancer. He didn’t want anyone to worry. They don’t know. Might be oral cancer or throat cancer or tongue cancer. No, there’s no point. By the time you got here, we’d be checking out to go home. Yes, I’ll be careful driving. Yes, I’m going to call him right now.”

Our son Ken was living in Ohio, and when I called I got the answering machine. It didn’t seem like the kind of message you should leave on a machine but I did. Then half an hour later I called again. And again, saying I’d call one more time at 5 p.m. and after that he could call me at home.

At five o’clock, as I walked back to the bank of telephones to make the final call, I had the idea that if I called from a different telephone, Ken would answer. I told him this when he picked up. “Yes, it does sound a little crazy,” I admitted. “No, I think I’m okay. He’s still sleeping. He didn’t want you to worry. They aren’t sure what kind of cancer. The incision’s nothing. He’s just groggy. We come back in two days. Then we’ll know what we’re dealing with. Yes, I’ll tell him. Yes, I’ll drive carefully. Yes, I’ll phone when I get home.”

When I got back to the room, Bob was awake and the doctor was just finishing his examination. “The nurse will give you the appointment information,” the doctor said.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Bob.

By the time I’d picked up the information from the nursing station, Bob was dressed and waiting in the hallway. “Do you want to wait in the lobby while I get the car?” I asked.

“Why? I’m fine. Let’s stop for dinner before we go home. I’m starving, and there’s a new place on Dundas I want to try.”

I didn’t tell him that I was so scared I couldn’t eat.

We went to a friend’s birthday party that weekend. Our friend Joy, who was a retired nurse, noticed the small scar on Bob’s cheek and asked him about it.

“They removed a little lump,” said Bob.

“Any follow-up?” Joy said.

“I’m going back next week. This is a nice house. I like the log construction.”

“Yes,” agreed Joy. “We want it to have all our favourite things since this is the house where we’re going to grow old together.”

I stepped outside with that phrase pounding in my chest: would Bob and I grow old together?

Joy was beside me in a moment. “What’s really going on?” she said.

I told her what we knew so far.

“If you ask the doctors for a straightforward assessment, including his chances, they’ll give you an honest answer,” Joy said. “If you want to know.”

“Of course I want to know.”

“Not everyone does. Sometimes it’s easier to handle things as they happen rather than face it all at once.”

“No, I can deal with it. I just need to know what we’re dealing with.”

“How’s Bob handling it?”

“He’s not making it the centre of his life.”

“Are you going to Italy soon?”

“We just got back a few months ago. I guess we’ll go again in the spring, or the summer. It depends.”

“Go to Supino. It’s always good for you.”

A letter arrived from my editor introducing herself and laying out the schedule for the publication of my book. Since the publisher was on the West Coast, we’d work together via telephone, computer, and mail.

I called my agent. “I’m not sure I can do this,” I said. “Bob has cancer and we don’t know yet if he’ll need surgery.”

“Do you want me to try to get a later publication date?”

“Would they go for that?”

“Yes, but they wouldn’t guarantee that they’d publish you at the later date. It all depends on how many other books they have on their list. It’s a bit of a gamble.”

“I just want the book to be as good as it can be and I don’t know if I can concentrate.”

“What does Bob say?”

I hadn’t asked him, not wanting to burden him with mundane things. I explained it all to him that evening. “What are the chances of a first-time author getting published?” asked Bob. I’d already told him this number months ago: 2,000 to one. I wrote back to the editor and asked her to send the first edits whenever she was ready.

The next week, we were downtown at the Wharton Head and Neck Centre at the Princess Margaret Hospital for our appointment with the specialist. The waiting room was large and crowded; we found seats near the window where Bob pretended to read a magazine and I stared out the window at nothing. I’d spent a fair amount of time waiting in doctors’ offices when our children were young and I was never very good at waiting, but now that Bob was the patient, I became calm. I knew he was worried and I didn’t want to add to it with my own nervousness. So, as I stared out the window, I thought of all the Italian words that meant tranquility — placida, serena, tranquilla, pace — and hoped they would seep through my body and I’d become the words.

“Peppe told me a story about when he was a boy,” said Bob. “Every morning, around one or two o’clock, the men and donkeys would gather at that little piazza to go up the mountain to cut firewood. Later the women met at the same piazza. They’d have copper pots to carry the water; most of them balanced the jugs on their heads. The women also carried baskets packed with their men’s lunches. On their way back, they’d fill their empty baskets with twigs for the fire. The part that Peppe really liked was that as the women set out, they began singing and you could hear their voices growing softer as they climbed higher. Now Peppe says the villagers have indoor plumbing so there’s no need to gather and walk singing to the mountain. It sounded better in Italian, but he said something like, ‘The women are rich because of the indoor plumbing, but they’re poor because they’ve lost the singing and the camaraderie.’ Peppe said that if you want to see those copper pots now, you have to go to the souvenir shop. They’re called congono in Supinese.”

“I wish I could add that little story to the book,” I said.

“I wish we were in Supino,” said Bob.

“The only thing we know for sure,” said the specialist, when we’d been called into his office, “is that nothing will be decided today. There’s no urgency. We want to be sure of our diagnosis before we do anything.”

We’d sat for over an hour in that crowded waiting room and Bob had been agitated the whole time. Now when the doctor used the words no urgency, I could feel Bob relax. The doctor asked if we’d mind if he called in his colleague from down the hall. Bob said, “Why not? We’re already here.”

Bob’s x-rays were up on the screen and several specialists took a look and offered different explanations, but the one I remember was the doctor who compared cancer to the roots of a tree. He said, “The lump that we removed is like the tree trunk, but, just like a tree, cancer sends out its roots below the skin. We can’t just dig a hole and pull out the roots. Some will break off. We have to make sure we get them all and the area around them so there’s no cancer left to multiply and send out new shoots.”

There was a little conference between the doctors and talk of rearranging schedules. I stared at the x-ray and wondered where those cancer roots had travelled. Bob checked his watch. “It won’t be much longer,” I said. “Once we know what we’re dealing with, it’ll be fine. I’m going to write down everything they say. It’ll be fine.”

“It’s cancer of the parotid gland,” began the oncologist. “That’s a gland just in front of your ear that secretes saliva. The problem with it is that it’s connected to a whole bunch of other areas, so a tumour like yours is difficult to pinpoint, especially if it has an extensive root system, which your tumour has. Most are benign, yours isn’t . . . stage 3 . . . fast-growing . . . rare adenocarcinoma . . . less favourable prognosis . . . extensive surgery followed by aggressive radiation . . .”

I stopped writing and took Bob’s hand. He was staring at the x-ray. I wasn’t sure if he was listening anymore.

“We work on a priority basis so that the more urgent cases are done first,” said the oncologist. “For example, a woman was in here earlier with a small scaly patch on her arm. We’ll get to her in a few months. She’s not urgent, not going to die in the next few months . . .”

Bob said, “When can you do the surgery?”

“The nurse will let you know. It’ll be high priority, and we’ll move you up if there’s a cancellation.”

“Who’d cancel surgery?” I asked Bob when we were back in the waiting room.

“Death,” he said.

I called my cousin Bill late that night, after Bob was asleep. My cousin was asleep too, but he answered. I told him what the oncologist had said, repeating word for word, “A woman was in here earlier with a small scaly patch on her arm. We’ll get to her in a few months. She’s not urgent, not going to die in the next few months . . .”

Bill said he didn’t think Bob was going to die in the next few months either. “They’ll do the operation and he’ll be okay.”

“But, what if?”

“You’ll cope,” said Bill.

So we decided that night that Bob had enough to worry about and I wouldn’t burden him with my fears. I’d cope. And if I thought that I couldn’t, I’d call Bill.

While we waited for the surgery date, we tried to carry on with our usual activities. Bob was determined that the cancer would not be the centre of his life — his centre would be his family and his community, as always. I did a lot of research, feeling I could handle anything as long as I knew what we were in for. I wanted to follow Bob’s lead and continue with our lives, but sometimes, in the night, I’d wake in a sweat thinking Bob had died. I’d open my eyes to reassure myself that Bob was right there beside me like always. Outside the window, the night sky was as dark as my thoughts. I couldn’t fathom the idea of a life without Bob, a man I’d known since I was 17 years old and he gave me a ride home from the library in his Chevy II convertible and my life had changed in an instant.

Bob carried on with the Supino Social Club activities, planning the Christmas party and discussing the pros and cons of holding the polenta feast outdoors in January like they did in Supino.

“We’d just need to get a few things,” said Bob. “Some giant cooking pots and wooden oars for stirring.”

“Where are you going to hold it?” I asked. In Supino, this winter festa was held on the piazza in front of the Church of San Nicola. The cooking pots were set over open fires on the cobblestones.

“That’s the problem. The City of Toronto requires permits and they don’t allow outdoor fires. We told the clerk that we’re not burning leaves, just making a fire to cook polenta, but he said, ‘What’s polenta?’”

“Well, you’ve got time. It’s only October.”

“If we were in Supino,” began Bob, “I’d be able to help Peppe with his chestnut harvest. He has these wooden rakes hanging up in his shed at his farm. You whack the chestnuts with them to break the skin. You have to wear gloves because of the prickly shell . . .”

That winter a lot of Bob’s conversations would begin with “If we were in Supino . . .” and most of mine would begin with “What if . . . ?” But I kept those conversations to myself.

Bob’s surgery was scheduled for January. Then it was moved up twice. Every time the doctors spoke to us, they added more information.

“This is more complex than heart surgery, so you can expect an 11- or 12-hour operation.”

“There’ll be an incision from the top of his ear down his cheek, his neck, into his shoulder. A second incision under his neck.”

“After we remove all the cancer, his face will be sunken. The muscle will grow back in a year or so. Unless the cancer comes back.”

“Radiation every weekday for seven weeks. Burning the throat like that makes swallowing difficult. He won’t be able to eat. He’ll have to be on a liquid diet. If it gets too bad, we’ll hospitalize him and put him on an IV. We’ll have to remove his salivary glands, so he’ll need to carry a bottle of water everywhere he goes.”

Every weekend in November, Bob combed through his photos from Supino and put them into albums. It took a long time because he’d often pause to say, “Remember this?” Bob and my father sitting at the kitchen table, eating watermelon and spitting the seeds out the back door into the ravine; Bob and my father on the balcony hanging a clothesline; Kathryn and me sitting on the front steps writing postcards; Kathryn and Davide on the motorcycle; Angela in her kitchen window; Benito with plants in hand; Joe at our front door with a basket of eggs, with a jug of wine, with a bowl of figs; Peppe with a basket of hazelnuts from the mountain; Joe and Bob and Benito hanging decorations for the Feast of San Lorenzo.

Who was the saint that people prayed to for good health?

My book edits arrived. I started reading the suggestions and after a few minutes, I put the pages down.

“I don’t think I can do it,” I said. “It’s too many things to consider. There are hundreds of pages and corrections on every one.”

“One page at a time,” said Bob.

“Look at this page, for example. She suggests moving this paragraph, cutting this whole line and she wants to know the relationship between us and the cousins who live on the farm.”

“Okay,” said Bob. “So one paragraph at a time.”

An envelope came from Peppe. Inside were two photographs of Supino taken from high up on the mountain and showing the village laid out below, all terra cotta roofs and winding streets. Bob got out the magnifying glass. When he found our house, he used the expression that my father had always used: “She looks good.” I was glad we’d spent the extra money to have our roof retiled with authentic terra cotta tiles instead of the new plastic ones that were starting to show up on rooftops here and there in Supino. The terra cotta tiles aged beautifully, their colours fading through the decades. When we climbed up the streets of old Supino Centro, where the houses dated back hundred of years, we could stop and look down on the wonderful patchwork of rooftops.

One time when we were walking the winding streets, Bob said, “Did you ever consider that we might have ended up buying a house in this old part of town?” We’d bought our house, sight unseen, with only a description from my cousin Johnny saying that he’d been in the house once and it had three rooms, a fireplace, and was located just up from the water fountain. A lot of houses were crammed into the streets just up from the water fountain.

“We could have bought one of these places,” said Bob, looking at the houses that hugged the mountainside, the flat roof of one house doubling as a patio for the one above. Some houses had a wide windowsill or doorway where the owner kept potted plants or a motor scooter. There were serpentine paths chiselled between the rocks. Narrow steps ran parallel to the houses. Every available recess was filled with a dwelling: one room, two rooms, and, if you were fortunate, a third room perched above. A recess too small for a house might contain a garden, a clothesline, and a wooden chair. If we’d bought here, we’d have had to park at the piazza centrale and carry everything up the winding pathways.

“Imagine bringing in the furniture or even the firewood,” said Bob. “Thank goodness for Camillo.”

“Who’s Camillo?”

“The donkey who carries the supplies.”

“How do you know his name?”

“You know,” said Bob, using that circular Supinese hand motion.

The surgery was now scheduled for the second week in December: Bob would be home for Christmas and able to start radiation in the new year. Our son Ken had come up from Ohio to help out at the coffee company and Kathryn had taken a leave from her university classes. They said they’d take care of the business and I could take care of Bob and the book edits. We all said that everything would be fine.

The day before the surgery, the doctor said, “Don’t come to the hospital and sit in the waiting room all day. It’s a 12-hour operation. Come later, around five.”

We were in the waiting room by nine. There were a few other groups. Toward 11 o’clock, a woman approached the waiting-room volunteer to complain. “The doctors said they’d be done by 10:30 and they’d come out and tell us how things went. It’s almost 11. What’s going on?”

The volunteer tried to calm the woman by explaining that surgery can begin a little late, there can be small complications, that the doctor would be out as soon as possible, and the woman needed to stay calm.

“Complications?” said the woman. “Late? Calm? You try staying calm when your father’s in surgery. They said 10:30 and . . .”

The volunteer had to call security. Security had to take the woman outside.

I said to my children, “We’re not going to behave like that.”

At noon we were discussing lunch, but no one wanted to leave. Ken finally said, “I’ll go and pick up some sandwiches. Nothing’s going to happen during the next half hour.” As soon as Ken left, the doctor arrived. It was too early for news. Only four hours had passed. They’d said 11 or 12 hours. It had to be bad news. Had the cancer spread so far they couldn’t remove it?

“The surgery’s going well,” the doctor said. “My colleague has taken over the next shift and I’ll be back in at four. We need you to sign permission for us to graft a vein from Bob’s leg in case we need to remove the vein near his eye.”

I explained it all to Ken when he returned with lunch.

“Remove the vein near his eye?” said Ken.

“I know,” I said, but I didn’t. I’d heard the doctor, but I hadn’t envisioned the wait and I hadn’t visualized how Bob would look afterwards. At five o’clock, the volunteer said the waiting room was closing.

“But my husband’s still in surgery,” I said. “You can’t close. Where are we going to go?”

“There’s a waiting room on the fourth floor, at the end of the intensive care unit. You can wait there. Your husband will be in recovery for a while before they move him to step-down.”

“What’s step-down?”

“The area between intensive care and a regular room.”

I thought of it as limbo, someplace between heaven and hell where people lingered while their fate was decided. We went to the new waiting room. It was heading to nine o’clock and we were watching the elevator every time the bell rang, hoping it was a stretcher and hoping Bob was on it.

A stretcher arrived. An old man with a thin face sat up on one elbow and looked around anxiously. As soon as he saw me, his face relaxed, he smiled a big lopsided smile, and I realized it was Bob. The incision was terribly long and held together with dozens of giant silver staples; the left side of Bob’s face was deflated as if his cheek had caved in and the deflation continued right down his neck and into his left shoulder. He lifted his right arm and waved.

Bob was home for Christmas and back at the hospital every weekday in January for radiation. We missed the Supino Social Club polenta festival. “Next year,” I said. “By then they’ll have an outdoor permit.”

A cardboard tube arrived in our mailbox. Inside was a note from Joe: “Your cousin told me you had an operation, Bob. Get better soon and come back to Supino.” And a charcoal sketch of the polenta pots set up over open fires in front of the Church of San Nicola.

“Let’s frame it,” I said. “We can hang it in the dining room.”

“Next year, I want to be there,” said Bob. “Joe said he’d get me on the committee of men who stir the polenta pots.”

“You don’t even like polenta.”

“But I like the sausages that they serve with the polenta.”

I’d heard the word radiation without ever thinking about what it actually was. In Bob’s case, it meant that the radiologist would burn Bob’s throat five times a week and Bob would have a permanent sore throat. “Like strep throat that never gets better,” said the doctor. “Until the radiation ends in seven weeks.”

Bob and I went to the first treatment together, but after that he said he’d drive himself. I wanted to set up a schedule for people eager to help and let our friends and family take turns driving Bob to his radiation appointments.

“It will give people a chance to spend some time with you,” I said.

“That’s not how I want to spend time with people,” said Bob.

So Bob drove himself, fitting the radiation appointments into his daily schedule as if they were just another entry on the day’s to-do list. During those seven weeks he stopped in to visit existing coffee customers, set up new ones, and kept his radiation appointments at Princess Margaret Hospital. He stopped at the gift shop on the way out, only now, instead of buying himself a chocolate bar, he bought a bottle of water.

The weekends were a little easier because there were two days without radiation. We were on the same seven-week deadline: I had to finish the edits and he had to finish the radiation. Often on a Sunday afternoon, I’d read parts of the book to Bob, and sometimes, when I looked up, he’d be fast asleep. Soon he couldn’t swallow anything but liquid, and then even liquids were too painful. He lost 30 pounds. At the end of the sixth week, we hosted a little birthday celebration for Bob’s dad, and Bob’s throat was so sore he couldn’t swallow the cake or the ice cream. As his parents were leaving, his father commented that there was only one more week of radiation, and Bob said, “I can’t do it anymore.”

His father said, “You have to do it. What’s the alternative?”

Bob finished the radiation in March, one week before the wedding celebration for the daughter of one of the Supino Social Club executives.

The day that we dressed for the wedding, I noticed that his shirt was too big around the neck. When Bob tightened his tie, the tie puckered his shirt collar. We had to put two new holes in his good leather belt. When Bob put on his jacket, it looked like he’d borrowed someone else’s suit.

“I look like some sort of clown,” said Bob.

“You look great,” I said.

“Great if I was impersonating a scarecrow,” said Bob.

After the wedding ceremony, outside the church, people offered their congratulations to the bride and groom and then they came to shake hands with Bob. That was the first day that Bob was able to swallow his food and he ate course after course and still lined up with the other guests to tackle the midnight dessert buffet.

Bob went for his follow-up oncology appointment and the prognosis was good. The second one was even better. He regained the lost weight. He did his exercises to rebuild the muscles in his left arm and shoulder. We got used to his sunken cheek and shrivelled neck and sloping shoulder.

Davide came to Toronto that summer for a two-week visit. As soon as he arrived, he telephoned his father. I heard him assure Peppe that Bob was well. After that first day, we saw very little of him. He and Kathryn would take off after breakfast and be gone for most of the day. They went to the museum and the art gallery and Kensington Market and Queen Street West and the Harley-Davidson motorcycle shop and the movies. He called home to Supino on Sundays to speak to his father and sister. It was raining the day Kathryn took him back to the airport.

My Father Came from Italy was launched in October, so instead of helping Peppe with his chestnut harvest, Bob was sitting in the front row and I was reading from my book. Members from the Toronto Supino Social Club came to the event at the Columbus Centre; the women brought baskets of homemade biscuits and cookies. I found out there were Supino Social Clubs in Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Sudbury; they all invited me to come and read from my book. Every reading and signing through the fall and winter, Bob was in the front row. In the spring, the book was published in the States, where there were even more Supino Social Clubs, and my American publicist set up a book tour for September starting in New York. We booked a trip to Supino for July and August. I packed a few copies of the book in my suitcase.

Bob went to his last doctor’s appointment the same week we left for Supino. “I don’t have to go back for three months,” he reported. “And after that appointment, six months, and then I don’t have to go back for a year.”