“What about my dad?”
“Your mom says he’ll be okay. I talked to her about it this afternoon.”
“You called her?”
“Yeah, of course,” he said. “I wasn’t going to buy her an airline ticket without talking to her.”
I didn’t want to state the obvious, which was that if Paul had called my mother out of the blue and offered to pay for one ticket and not two, he’d put her in an incredibly awkward spot. She’d have hated turning down the chance to see me, but she also would have hated the idea of leaving my father alone at Christmas.
Paul could see my hesitation. “Your mom said he’ll go to your aunt’s. It’s not a big deal.”
I pictured my father at Aunt Arlene’s, eating dry turkey and cranberry sauce out of a can. “She doesn’t even put up a tree,” I said, and Paul rolled his eyes.
I wanted to explain that Christmas was different without my brother and that my parents needed each other in a way they maybe hadn’t before Lenny died. When I’d called home on Christmas morning last year, they’d made a big deal out of telling me about my mother’s egg casserole and the Weedwacker she’d bought my father, but I had seen right through the charade. Their kids were gone, the house was empty, and the holiday was a reminder of everything they’d lost.
Paul wasn’t hearing any of it. “Do you want her to come or not?” he said, and I admitted that I did. Very much.
“Well, then, stop bitching about it. I was trying to do something nice.”
123.
IT HAD BEEN A YEARand a half since I’d seen my mother, a fact I could scarcely believe as I rushed into her outstretched arms at the airport in Olbia. I had gone to pick her up on my own because it was a weekday afternoon and Paul was at work, but I was secretly glad to have some time to catch up, just the two of us, before we introduced Paul into the mix.
“You look incredible,” she said as she held my face in her hands.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” I whispered into her neck, which smelled like Pall Malls and Pears soap.
On the drive to Palau, I pointed out the nuraghi and the Madonnelle and all the other roadside novelties I’d begun to take for granted.
“Is it all like this?” she asked, gesturing out the window at the scenery. “So rugged?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
After I’d pulled the car onto the ferry, I told my mother to bundle up, then herded her up the stairs and out onto the deck, where, as fate would have it, we ran smack into Mary Lou, who was trying to use her whole body to protect her lit cigarette from the wind. I introduced her to my mother.
“What an absolute honor,” said Mary Lou. “Eileen has told me so much about you.”
“She has, has she?” said my mother, who seemed to sense, without needing to be told, that Mary Lou was full of hot air.
We talked for a few minutes about Mom’s flight and what Dad was doing while she was gone, but all I wanted was for my mother to pay attention to La Maddalena’s fast approach.
“Are you going to take her to the Christmas market?” Mary Lou asked, and I said that I would. “Oh, and you’ve got to do the live nativity. That’s so much fun.”
“Are you writing this down?” my mother asked in a tone that made clear she was kidding.
Mary Lou didn’t pick up on it. “Unfortunately, you missed the tree lighting.”
“Thatisunfortunate,” said my mother, and I was so overcome with joy, I had to work hard to stifle a laugh.
124.
EVEN WITHOUT THE TREE LIGHTING,my mother and I stayed busy, going to all my favorite bars and bakeries and gelaterias. We bought panettone at the Comiti Uno and Christmas lights at the hardware store, and by the time she’d been on the island for a couple of days, she told me she felt like a local.
Francesca insisted I bring her to my Tuesday lesson, where we didn’t speak a word of Italian, because what would have been the point? Instead, Francesca made us coffees, and I sat by and watched as these two important women in my life got acquainted.
It was no great surprise that they hit it off. Francesca was generous with the compliments, and what mother doesn’t love hearing her child praised? “Your daughter has a beautiful accent,” Francesca told my mother, who nodded along enthusiastically, as if this were an attribute that had been obvious since birth.
For most of the hour, Francesca peppered my mother with questions. She wanted to know what I was like as a little girl, if I had been a rebellious teenager, and what my mother had thought when I’d brought Paul home. “You must have hated him for taking her halfway around the world,” she said, and it occurred to me that she was really trying to suss out what my mother thought about Paul, period.
