restaurant—additions my nonna calls invadente—intrusive.
I spy our old brick row house—the only house I’ve ever known. While my parents honeymooned in Niagara Falls back in the 1980s, Nonna Rosa and Nonno Alberto moved all of their belongings down to the first level, allowing my parents to make their home on the second floor. My dad has lived there ever since. I wonder sometimes what my father, who was over a decade older than my mother, thought of his in-laws’ arrangement. Did he have any choice? Was my mother just as strong willed as her mother, my nonna Rosa?
I have only faint memories of Josephina Fontana Lucchesi Antonelli, standing at the stove, smiling and telling me stories while she stirred bubbling pots that smelled of apples and cinnamon. But Daria says it’s my imagination, and she’s probably right. Daria was four and I was only two when our mother died from acute myelogenous leukemia—what I’ve since learned is the deadliest form of the disease. My memory surely was of her mother, my nonna Rosa, at the stove. But the smiling storyteller doesn’t jibe with the reality of my surly nonna, the woman who, for as long as I can remember, has seemed perpetually irritated with me. And why wouldn’t she be? Her daughter’s illness coincided perfectly with her pregnancy with me.
“Afternoon, Emmie.” Mr. Copetti, dressed in his blue and gray uniform, stops before turning up the sidewalk. “Want your mail now, or should I put it in your box?”
I trot over to him. “I’ll take the Publishers Clearing House winner’s notification. You keep the bills.”
He chuckles and sorts through his canvas bag, then hands me a taco-like bundle, a glossy flyer serving as its shell.
“Just what I was hoping for,” I say, giving it a cursory glance. “Credit card applications and Key Food coupons I’ll never remember to use.”
He smiles and lifts a hand. “Have a nice day, Emmie.”
“You, too, Mr. Copetti.”
I move next door to another brick building, this one beige, and step into the entryway. Patrizia Ciofi belts out an aria from La Traviata. I peer through the glass door. Despite the opera thundering from his 1990s CD player—the newest item in his shop—Uncle Dolphie is sound asleep in one of his barber chairs. Strangely, it’s the jingling of the bells when I open the door that always startles him. I pull the handle and, as expected, he jumps to life, swiping at the drool on his chin and straightening his glasses.
“Emilia!” he cries, with such gusto you’d swear he hadn’t seen me in weeks. My uncle is more cute than handsome, with a head full of downy white curls and cheeks so full you’d swear he’d just had his wisdom teeth extracted. He’s wearing his usual barber smock, solid black with three diagonal snaps on the right collar, and Dolphie embroidered on the pocket.
“Hi, Uncle Dolphie,” I shout over the music. The younger brother of Nonna Rosa, Dolphie is technically my great-uncle. But Fontanas don’t bother with these kinds of distinctions. I hold out the bag to him. “Pistachio biscotti and a slice of panforte today.”
“Grazie.” He teeters as he snags the bag, and I resist the urge to steady him. At age seventy-eight, my uncle is still a proud man. “Shall I get a knife?” he asks.
I give my usual reply. “It’s all yours, thanks.”
He makes his way over to his CD player, perched on the ledge of a mirror. With a hand peppered in age spots, he lowers the volume. The opera quiets. I set my mail beside the cash register and step over to an old metal cart, littered with magazines and advertising leaflets, and pour myself a cup of coffee with cream.
We sit side by side in the empty barber chairs. His rectangular wire-framed glasses, similar to mine but twice as large, slide down his nose as he eats his treat.
“Busy day?” I ask.
“Sì,” he says, though the tiny shop is empty, as always. “Extremely.”
When I was a little girl, my uncle would have three men waiting for cuts, another for a hot shave, and two more drinking grappa and playing Scopa in the back room. Dolphie’s barbershop was the neighborhood hub, the place to come for opera and boisterous debate and local gossip. But these days, the shop is as vacant as a telephone booth. I guess I can’t blame anyone for no longer trusting a shaky old man to hold a razor to his neck.
“Your cousin Luciana scheduled a haircut today. I