“It’s your birthday. Nothing is too expensive tonight.”
She squeezed my arm. “You sound like your father when you say that.”
I didn’t answer right away. My father had been gone nineteen years, and Mom rarely mentioned him without her voice softening into something distant and far away. That night, though, she sounded almost peaceful about it, so I let the moment breathe instead of filling it with anything else.Pregnancy & Maternity
“Tell me again about Italy,” I said as we walked. “The village. The hills.”
“Ah, you’ve heard it a hundred times.”
“I want to hear it a hundred and one.”
She smiled up at me, her eyes catching that wet shine they always got whenever she remembered home. “There was a little square with a fountain,” she said. “And a bakery on the corner where I bought bread every morning. The boys played soccer in the street outside.”
“Sounds perfect.”
“It was. Until it wasn’t. But that’s a story for another night.”
I didn’t press her. There were pieces of her life she’d folded up and tucked away long before I was even born, and I’d learned, over the years, to respect the corners she chose not to unfold.Culinary Training
