When we first landed, I stood feeling stupidly half-awake
as Mom hailed a taxi. “
Portarci al Boscolo Exedra Roma,”
she told
the driver.
“Naturalmente, bella,”
he answered, smiling warm and slow
at us in the backseat. He dropped a heavy wink—at me, at my
mother, I couldn’t tell—before he turned back around and
pulled away from the curb.
The hotel was beautiful, an old castle they’d made into a
modern resort, and the people working there were beautiful,
too. Our room had only one bed, and as I sat on its edge I
thought about how this was supposed to be my parents’ roman-
tic getaway. I thought about the things they might have done
together in this room, in this bed.
Momwas putting away her dresses in the closet, taking them
out of her suitcase one at a time, shaking out the wrinkles, hang-
ing them on wooden hangers just like the ones we had at home.
“Tell me how you met Dad again?”
“Again?” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever told you before.”
“Well, I know you met here, in Rome,” I said. “But where,
exactly?”
“At a church,” she said. “In front of a statue.”
“Oh. Which statue?”
She hung the last dress and closed the closet. Then she
walked in front of me to the window and stared out onto the
street below. She stared out the window for a long time.
“The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa,” she said at last. When she
spoke, her back was still to me.
“What were you doing at the church?” Neither of my par-
ents was religious.
Finally she turned and looked at me. She looked at me the
same way she had looked at me back in our kitchen, just two
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