I study the wine in my glass. I can’t begin to calculate how many times it’s been refilled over the past two hours. My words are loose.
“I lost someone I love,” I tell her. “And I couldn’t really find my way to keeping my life like it was before she was gone.” I lift my eyes up to meet hers.
Carol looks at me a long moment, and then she turns her head to gaze out over the water. The sky is fading—that familiar haze of golden, warm light bathing the city in a hue only Italy knows.
“I understand that,” she says. “Life doesn’t always turn out the way we think it’s going to, does it? I understand that,” she repeats.
“Your mother,” I say. “What was she like?”
Carol looks back to me. “She was wonderful,” she says. “A total firecracker. She had an opinion about everything and could drink any man under the table. That’s what my father says. She’s been gone so long sometimes it’s hard to remember her. I was only twelve.”
“I’m so very sorry.”
“Thank you.” She looks at me a long moment. Time seems to hover, and I want to ask her something else, something about what she did, how she got by, to offer up my own grief here, too, but instead what comes out is:
“I’m married.”
Carol blinks hard.
“Or I was. Am? That’s part of it. Eric, that’s his name. I told him I was going to Italy, and I wasn’t sure if I was coming back to him.”
Carol’s eyes get big. “Wow,” she says, but that’s it. She doesn’t offer anything after, so I continue.
“We got married so young,” I tell her. “He was my first and only serious boyfriend. And lately, I don’t know. I’m starting to feel like he was there and it just happened and it wasn’t based in anything. Like I didn’t choose it. I loved him. I do, love him. I don’t even know what I am saying, or what I am feeling, only that I got to a point where I just couldn’t keep going as we had been, I had to—”
“—Katy.” She exhales and then inhales, her warm hands on my shoulders, pressing down. “You have got to breathe.”
My chest hovers, and then I follow her example. I exhale all the air I’ve been holding out of my lungs. It feels like relief. I breathe in the sweet and salty Italian sea air.
“Good,” she says. She takes her hand back. “Sometimes you need time away to figure out how you feel about something. It’s hard to know or to see what something is when it’s right here, up close, all the bright and harsh details.” She holds her palm millimeters from her face, then drops it. “And love,” she says. “Who even knows about that one.”
Eric would always tell me he looked up to my parents’ marriage, that it was what he aspired to for us someday. “They love each other,” he’d say. “It’s obvious your mom gets on your dad’s nerves, but also that he’d lay down his life for her. And he doesn’t listen to half the things she says, but about the important stuff, they’re always on the same page. At the end of the day, it’s obvious it’s them.”
My mom was a better wife than I am. She was a better everything, but she was definitely a better wife.
“There is a saying, ‘What got you here won’t get you there.’？”
I never heard Carol say that before. Not to me.
“What does it mean?” I ask.
“That the same set of circumstances, beliefs, actions that got you to a moment won’t get you to what comes next. That if you want a different outcome, you have to behave differently. That you have to keep evolving.”
Don Luigi rings a bell, startling me back to this moment, this restaurant, this place and time.
“Buonasera. I hope you enjoy La Tagliata. We welcome you, and long may we gather!”
Everyone lifts their wineglasses high in a happy and celebratory toast.
Carol tilts hers toward mine. We clink. “Long may we gather,” she says.
Amen.
Chapter Fifteen
We arrive at Bella Bar a little after nine. The drive down from La Tagliata felt like it lasted a third of the time it had taken to get up there—that’s how full on food and hazy from wine we were. The whole bus sang “That’s Amore” as we made our way back down to the sea.
When the world seems to shine like you’ve had too much wine…
The place is small, across the street from where I believe Adam and I had wine… today? It feels like a month ago.