Chapter One
Bianca
It’s not the first funeral I’ve been to at this church.
Itisthe first one without Nonna sitting next to me.
It smells the same—old wood and candle wax and the sharp perfume that always smells the same—but it feels wrong, like a shirt worn backward.
Light pours through the stained glass and breaks across the pews in jewel-toned patches, but none of it touches Nonna.She lies in a satin-lined box, rosary tucked between fingers that taught me how to shape gnocchi with the lightest pressure, like holding a baby bird.
I stand at the end of the aisle until a cousin I haven’t seen in years nudges me into motion. People shift to make room. My heels click on the tile, a too-bright sound in a room of crying and soft gossip. Atlantic City hums somewhere beyond these walls. Life goes on. But in here, time stands still.
Mama—Francesca to the rest of the world—sits in the front pew with a tissue crumpled in her fist. Her mouth is set in the line I know from every time I broke the rules. It’s her trying to hold herself together.
I slide in beside her, and our shoulders touch. She smells like she always has: coffee and Acqua di Parma Colonia, which she’s been wearing as long as I can remember. I kiss her temple. Her hair is a bit stiff with hairspray.
“You made it,” she whispers, like it’s a miracle and not just a plane ticket from Florence to New Jersey. Still, Nonna went so quickly that I was too far away to be here in her last moments.
“I told you I would.”
“I know.” She reaches for my hand, squeezes, lets go. “You look thin.”
“I’m just tall,” I say, because that’s what she always says when relatives comment, and it makes her almost-smile. The almost-smile breaks, and she presses the tissue to it.
Nonna Sabina is wearing navy, not black. She would have hated black. “What am I, a widow twice?” she would say, rolling her eyes, meaning my grandfather, whom I never met.
Someone has tucked a sprig of rosemary in with her rosary, a cook’s benediction. I swallow against the sudden lump in my throat.
The priest clears his throat. He’s older and has been standing in that same spot since I was a child. He’s known Nonna longer than I’ve been alive. He talks about long lives and good works and the body as a vessel, and I count the tiny nicks in the pew in front of me, the places where rings have clicked in nervous hands.
When he says Nonna’s name, something in me refuses to make a past tense out of it. She is the woman who spread flour on the table the first time I could see over it, who smacked my wrist when I tried to lick the spoon, who told me every sauce needed patience and salt.
“She used to come early to light a candle,” the priest says. “Always sat in the second row, left side.”
“She liked the light there,” Mama murmurs. “Said it made her prayers feel heard.”
There’s a murmur as people stand and sit and kneel in practiced choreography. I don’t bother with the kneeler. I aim my attention at the flicker of votives, an army of small flames. A draft slips under the heavy doors, and the flames all lean the same way for a breath.
After the prayers and the final hymn, the line to the casket forms like a river. People file past with their condolences and their casseroles waiting in trunks outside.
Neighborhood ladies with heavy perfume that stings your nostrils. Old men who called my grandmother “queen” and meant it. Guys from the produce market, their hands scrubbed raw, ducking their heads. A man I don’t know kisses Mama’s cheek and says something about how Regalia kept him fed when his wife was sick, and Mama folds like a napkin in his hands. I realize I’m holding my breath and force air into my lungs.
“Bianca.” My name comes from the other side of the aisle. Zia Loredana, my mother’s older sister, with her lipstick perfect and her eyes daring anyone to say she’s been crying. She hugs me hard and pulls back to frame my face in her hands. “Bella. Italy suits you.”
“Grazie,” I say, because English feels wrong right now. “I had to come—”
“For the funeral,” she finishes gently. “Of course.” Her eyes flick to Mama. “We will talk about the rest later.”
The rest. The restaurant and everything in it. The old pipes that bang like an angry ghost. The dough sheeter that died at Christmas and was resurrected with a paper clip and prayer. The line cooks who still call Nonna “boss,” even though my mother has been running the place for the past few years.
My job back in Florence, the chef who promised me the late summer menu would be mine to run when the time came. My apartment over the piazza, the neighbor who waters my plant and texts me pictures of the cat that suns itself on my sill.
“I’ll fly back after the—after we…” I can’t get the word out.
“Bury,” Zia supplies. She always could say the hard part without flinching. “We’ll see.”
We’ll see. My brow furrows at that. What does that mean?
