his eyes. He poured a pint of IPA for himself, which was unusual: Luca didn’t drink at work. He had realized I needed company and broke with habit to join me. I tipped my glass at him—cheers—and drank the gin down. It felt good, the slow, sure rush of alcohol, the inevitable flood of blood to my brain.
“What is it, then?” Luca asked, looking down at the documents spread over the bar.
“I’m not exactly sure,” I said, taking another long sip of my drink. “It came to the house today.”
“Looks like Italian.” He picked up the envelope and read the flowery Italian names aloud, each one like blossoms on a branch: “Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco. Who the hell is that?”
I shrugged. “I know as much as you do.”
He looked at the return address. “Torino?”
Something surfaced in my mind, a memory rising from an obscure depth. “Didn’t our grandparents come from Turin?”
“They were farther north,” Luca said. “Up in the Alps.”
Our grandparents had been born in the same small village in northern Italy. They had immigrated to New York City after the Second World War, lived in a tight community in Little Italy, and then moved to Milton in the fifties, drawn by backyards and good public schools. Luca and I had grown up in the shadows of this migration—the elaborate Sunday lunches that went on all afternoon, the Catholic school education, the way we looked as though we were part of the same clan. Our heritage was northern Italian, our skin washed pale as a snowdrift, our hair white-blond, and our eyes watered down to the lightest shade of blue. Our ancestry held fast in our genes like the clasp of a fob to a chain, even as our grandparents, then our parents, became Americans.
Despite my shared heritage with Luca, our families had not been close. In fact, I always felt that they had disliked each other, especially the older generation, although I had nothing concrete to back this feeling up. Luca’s paternal grandmother, Nonna Sophia, had never been particularly warm to me, not even at our wedding. When Luca and I took her to church on Sundays, as we used to do before the separation, she never sat near me on the pew, but between her son and grandson, as if I might rub off on her.
“How is Nonna doing, anyway?” I asked, fingering the documents on the bar. Nonna had been born in Italy, and it struck me that she might help me understand the letter.
“Eighty-six and healthy as a horse,” he said, taking a handful of peanuts.
“That woman will outlive all of us,” I said, feeling both admiration and dread.
“She hasn’t been doing very well since the move, actually,” he said. “My dad says her mood is worse than ever.”
Bob and Luca had moved Nonna to a condo at the Monastery, a retirement community on the river, earlier in the year. It had been a big production. Nonna hadn’t wanted to leave her house, but Bob had insisted.
“She doesn’t like it there?”
“Not really. It’s hard to get used to a new environment.” Something in his voice told me he was talking more about himself than his grandmother. “She misses her old life, but she’ll be okay. She’s resilient.”
He met my eyes, and I knew that he was waiting for me to discuss his move back home. He wanted to let everything bad that had happened between us slide away. He wanted to start over.
“I’m working on things,” I said, an edge creeping into my voice that I hadn’t meant to be there. “You know that.”
“I know, I know,” he said, giving me a sweet smile. “But it might be easier with a little help, don’t you think?”
I pushed the papers toward Luca to shift his attention to the problem at hand. “Do you think Nonna would take a look at these for me? Maybe she can tell me what this is all about?”
“She might,” Luca said, glancing again at the papers. He seemed as intrigued as I was about them. “Why don’t you stop by the Monastery and see what she says?”
I bit my lip, wondering if I would regret bringing Nonna into the situation. Things were hard enough between Luca and me without getting his whole family involved. Maybe it was time I solved my own problems, especially now that we were living apart.
“Do you think she’ll be able to understand this?” I asked, but I knew perfectly well that she would understand all of