Mary shook her head slowly and said, “I’m a dope.”
Angelina said, “Well, if you had taken the money, I could visit you, that’s one thing you could have done with it.”
Mary said, “I understand that. Now.”
“And why do you say you didn’t earn it? You raised five girls, Mom.”
Mary nodded. “I always felt that I was at the mercy of your father and his family. Like I was a kept woman. I should have had a job. But why would I have had a job? I don’t know what you and Jack have done about finances, but I’ll tell you, Angelina, it’s a good thing you’ve always worked. It makes things a lot more fair between two people.”
Angelina said, “Jack’s going to come back.”
“Jack left? I didn’t know he’d left.” Mary pulled back to look at her daughter.
Angelina said, “I don’t want to talk about it, but things were my fault too. So he’s coming back. When I get home.”
“He left?”
“Yes. And I don’t want to talk about it.”
But Mary was really frightened now; her chatty little Angel, who used to tell her everything, all the nights putting her to bed, the baths drawn—whoosh, it was gone, gone! “Honey,” she said after a moment, “it’s none of my business, but was there another woman?”
Angelina looked at her mother with a sudden stoniness. “Yeah.” And then in a moment she added, “You.”
“What do you mean?” Mary said.
“I mean, the other woman was you, Mom. I couldn’t get over your leaving. I couldn’t stop talking about you. And Jack said I was in love with my mother.”
“Oh, honey. Oh dear God,” said Mary.
“He left over a year ago, and I was going to come see you last summer, but he kept saying he might come back, so I stayed home, but now he really is going to come back.”
Angelina allowed her mother to take hold of her, and Angelina wept on her mother’s chest. She wept for a long time. Every so often she made a sound of such terrible pain that Mary felt removed from it. Finally, Angelina lifted her head, wiped at her nose, and said, “I feel better now.”
They sat together on the couch for many minutes, Mary’s arm around her girl. Mary ran her other hand over Angelina’s leg. Then Mary said, “You know, when I first saw you in these jeans I thought maybe you were having an affair.”
Angelina sat up straight. “What?” she said.
“I didn’t know it was with me.”
“Mom, what are you talking about?”
Mary said, “Well, honey, these jeans are kind of tight for a woman your age, and I just thought—you know, maybe—”
Angelina began to laugh, though her face was still wet. “Mom, I bought these jeans special for this trip. I thought women in Italy wore— I thought they wore sexy things.”
“Oh, the jeans are sexy,” Mary said. She didn’t think they were sexy at all.
“You don’t like them?” Angelina looked ready to cry again.
“Honey, I do.”
And then Angelina—oh, bless her soul—began to really laugh. “Well, I don’t like them. I feel like a jerk in them. But I bought them special, so you’d think I was, you know, sophisticated or something.” Angelina added, “In my one-piece bathing suit!” Both of them laughed until they had tears in their eyes, and even then they kept on laughing. But Mary thought: Not one thing lasts forever; still, may Angelina have this moment for the rest of her life.
Mary said that she was going out to sit in the courtyard by the church and have her evening smoke. In fact, Mary had not had a cigarette since she’d moved here. She had told the man in the shop that the cigarettes were for her daughter.
“Okay, Mom,” Angelina said, and her mother went and got her yellow leather pocketbook. In a few minutes, Angelina looked from the window and saw that her mother was sitting on a bench that overlooked the town, and also the sea. She sat beneath a streetlamp, and Angelina could just make out that her earbuds were in, her head moving slightly up and down, a cigarette held to her lips. Then Angelina saw a woman come up to her mother, and Angelina realized it must be Valeria; how happy her mother seemed to see her! Her mother stood, and she and this tiny woman kissed each other on one cheek and then the other, and Angelina watched her mother’s hands gesticulating; at one point she held the cigarette toward her friend and they both laughed. Then the small woman reached up and they kissed on each cheek again, and the small woman went away and Angelina’s mother sat down again. She sat there on the bench, took two more long puffs on her cigarette, then squished it against the ground, but she held the butt and carefully placed it in a small plastic bag she took from her large yellow pocketbook.