The confusion only lasts a moment.
Of course, a spoon. I picture heavy wood, decades of work burned into it. Sentiment among chefs.
“Good,” I say. Because I’m not sure how to make this better, take that look off her face and replace it with something happier.
We turn left. The portico changes style, columns a little chunkier, bricks patched where time has shaped them.
She stops at a wooden door with an iron latch polished by generations of hands and keys. A brass plate shows three surnames.
She pulls a key out and deftly opens the door, pushing it in with her shoulder. She holds it open for me, and we step into a dim stairwell that smells like stone, old mail, and drying lavender.
No elevator. Narrow stairs. Terracotta treads rubbed thin in the center by thousands of footsteps. She takes them in a steady rhythm, hand sliding over the cool iron railing that runs up.
I could offer to carry her bag. This is her apartment. She’s done this a million times.
Second landing. A window the size of a shoebox offers a slice of sky the color of unpolished pewter.
Third landing. She shifts her shoulders, breathes once, and keeps going. The silence between us isn’t empty; it’s loaded with all the things she’s keeping inside.
Fourth floor. She stops, keys already in her hand, and turns down a short hall. Her door is painted the kind of green that onlylooks good in old buildings. The key turns, and the bolt slides back with a heavy thud.
She pushes in and steps aside to let me pass. I don’t, not first. It’s her home. She goes in, and I follow.
It’s small by the measure of American apartments.
By Bologna standards, it’s perfect.
Light comes in from high windows and a set of glass doors at the far end that open to a shallow balcony no wider than a man’s stride.
The ceiling carries beams that have seen more years than my company, more years than my father ever planned. The floor is the old cotto, warm underfoot even when the air isn’t.
To the right is the kitchen. Two burners, not four. A gas oven that would make most American recipes panic.
Open shelving that holds bowls that are actually used routinely, and stacks of dishes that occasionally match. A well-used wooden board leans against the wall; the mattarello rests on a bracket above it like a beloved instrument.
There’s a jar of salt on the counter—flaky, not cheap—and a bottle of grocery-store olive oil that awaits frying jobs while the prestige oil one lives in dark glass in a cupboard.
Hooks hold two pans: one stainless, one carbon steel worn thin at the center and black as a moonless field.
A small table sits under the window. Two chairs.
The table holds a shallow bowl with two lemons, one that should probably be used today and one that can sit a little longer. There’s a linen runner that looks as if it’s been washed a hundred times. A corkscrew sits halfway under it like someone left in a hurry.
Which, I suppose, she did.
She has no television in the main room. Shelves run along one wall with books that are mostly cookbooks, but not all; I see a novel with the spine broken in the middle and a book on regional dialects.
A framed photo stands behind a small plant: not a posed wedding shot, not glamour. It looks like an old picture, people at a table outside, hands mid-gesture, someone laughing so hard her eyes are shut.
A desk the size of a cafe table holds a laptop and a stack of legal pads, most of them written on both sides and dog-eared. Two stubby pencils. A roll of blue tape—the kitchen kind, not the office kind. A black Sharpie. She apparently labels everything the way a cook does: clearly, with the assumption that someone else will need to know what this is and when she made it.
On a peg near the door, a canvas tote hangs with the logo of the Saturday market stamped crooked in green ink. Below it sits a pair of used-to-be white sneakers that are creased and well-worn.
Beside those: a pair of black flats with the right toe nicked. I find that detail inexplicably human.
The balcony holds terracotta pots. Rosemary gone a little woody and stubbornly alive, thyme flourishing, a pot of flat parsley that is trying. A clothespin bag hangs from a hook. A line runs overhead for drying shirts.
Her bedroom is visible through an open doorway: a narrow bed, a white cover, a print of something abstract on the wall.
