second-class deck of the SS Augustus. At any other time, he would consider it lucky that his middle name was the same as the ship’s. But not this time. Whenever he heard the horns blow at sea, he remembered shoveling coal in the belly of the SS Chicago. He remembered meeting Luigi, and how no matter how much he scrubbed, his skin was gray from the coal dust after a week in the pit.
Now, he was an older man, and he led the life of one who has earned his way out of steerage. Ciro was not in first class, where the passengers were pampered, but his room in second class was comfortable, and the windows were above the waterline. He smiled to himself when he went to sleep the first night. He had never traveled across the ocean above the waterline.
Every moment of the journey brought back memories. When he heard his native Italian as the ship docked in the port of Naples, he was surprised to find that it moved him so deeply that he wept. When he boarded the train to go north, he couldn’t get enough of the people; he took in every detail of them and remembered when he too was Italian. He realized he had missed them, and his heart ached with the knowledge that he would not die in the country where he was born. Now he was neither Italian nor American; he was a dying man on a mission to make whole what never had been, and to heal a wound for which there was no salve or balm.
Ciro decided to climb the last bit of the Passo Presolana on foot. He sent his duffel ahead on the carriage to the convent of San Nicola, where the nuns had prepared the guest room for him.
Ciro buttoned his coat as he hiked up the hill to the entrance of Vilminore. He stopped at the top of a cliff and looked down into the gorge, where the green leaves of late summer had fallen away, leaving behind a tangle of gray. From his vantage point, the branches looked like a mass of childhood scribbles, a charcoal nest of intersecting lines and curves, made when a boy was just learning to write.
Ciro smiled when he remembered the girls he would woo to walk with him along the cliffs, and how it was the perfect excuse to hold a girl’s hand where the road narrowed. He remembered the day Iggy had brought Eduardo and him down the mountain, how they didn’t say much, but Iggy let him smoke a cigarette. Ciro had been fifteen when he was sent away. One transgression against the priest in the Church of Rome had changed the course of his life.
As he walked in the grooves of the cinnamon-colored earth, he thought of Enza, and the life they would have had on the mountain. Maybe she would have been able to have more children here, away from the pressures of making a living. Maybe he would have built the house on the hill that he had imagined in his dreams.
It had been twenty years since Ciro stood in the piazza of Vilminore. As he surveyed the colonnade, he realized that not much about it had changed. Some of the shops had been handed down to the sons, but mostly the village was just as he left it, houses of stucco surrounding the San Nicola church and rectory, and anchored across the way by the convent. The chain of command appeared to be what it always had been; the feeling of the place was familiar.
Ciro rapped on the convent door, then pulled the chain to ring the bell. When the door opened, Sister Teresa gently took Ciro’s face in her hands. She still had the face she had twenty years ago; only a small web of lines around her eyes like spider silk betrayed her age.
“Ciro Lazzari!” she exclaimed. “My boy!” She threw her arms around him.
“I’m an old man now. I’m thirty-six years old,” he told her. “Look at my fingers. See the scars from the lathe? I’m a shoemaker.”
“Good for you. Enza wrote to me. She told me if she waited for you to write a letter, I would be waiting until Judgment Day.”
“That’s my wife.”
“You’re a lucky man.” She folded her hands into the sleeves of her habit. Ciro thought he was anything but lucky. Couldn’t Sister Teresa see that he was running out of time? The nun took