Page 187

“Use the horn.” I shrug.

He shakes his head, but then an old man on a Piaggio Ape pulls directly in front of the car ahead of us and a loud horn immediately goes off.

“See?” I say.

“Is it always like this?” Lexy asks, her eyes alive as she takes everything in.

“Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

I look at Chiara and we both laugh.

“Put some music on!” I tell Jude.

He turns on the radio and as soon as the music comes through the speakers, Chiara squeals.

“I love this song!”

It’s one I know too.

We both start singing along to A me mi piace by Alfa.

Lexy doesn’t understand a word, but she’s dancing in her seat right next to us while we laugh.

The farther we travel along the coast, the smaller the roads become. Little houses appear with balconies and laundry hanging outside. Oleander explodes along walls. Old men sit in plastic chairs in the shade like they have absolutely nowhere else in the world they need to be.

The hills rise on one side of us and the Tyrrhenian Sea keeps appearing on the other, brilliant blue between buildings and trees, disappearing around a curve only to come back again.

“This is so far from Wyoming,” I tell Jude as I watch him take it all in.

Here everything feels closer together. Roads curling around hills, houses stacked above one another, villages that look like they grew out of the rock itself.

He turns and smiles at me.

“You’re happy.”

I smile back. “I am.”

Then we round another bend.

I sit forward.

“Oh.”

Jude looks at me. “What?”

I point through the windshield.

“There.”

Coreca.

My heart squeezes.

The little village sits against the hillside above the Tyrrhenian, houses scattered among the green, the sea opening up beneath it.

I haven’t lived here since I was eleven. Chicago is where I grew up, where I went to school, where I met Damiano, where I became an adult.

But blood and bones apparently have their own memory.