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“Jiggle the handle. It’ll stop running,” Aunt Lil says from outside the door.

“Can do,” I say through the door. I wash my hands and join them in the kitchen. “Joe, please fix the toilet.”

“Louie used to fix everything around here that was broken.” Aunt Lil begins to cry. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I keep thinking he’s going to come in that door. I’m alone. You can’t imagine the terror.”

“You’re safe,” Joe says. “You have ADT, and Mom and Dad are right down the street.”

“Don’t forget Cousin Carmine,” I tell her. “You have a state trooper six houses down.”

“I’m not afraid of someone from the outside; I’m afraid of being alone on the inside.”

I give Aunt Lil a hug. “Uncle Louie loved you so much. He always said he was the luckiest man in the world because you married him.”

“He did?”

I nod. “When he wasn’t talking marble, he was bragging about his Lil.”

“Do you think he knew how much I loved him?”

“Yes!” Joe and I say in unison.

“He went first because he couldn’t bear the thought of losing you.” I reach for her hand.

“Thank you, Jess.” Aunt Lil wipes her eyes. “He loved you like his own daughter.”

“Jess, why don’t you get the paperwork you need from Uncle Louie’s office, and I’ll sit with Aunt Lil.”

“Jess, I wish I could help you, but I knew nothing about Louie’s business.” Lil holds up her hands as though resisting arrest.

“I won’t be long.”

“Take whatever you need,” she says to me.

I sling the empty duffel bag over my arm and climb the carpeted stairs to Uncle Louie’s home office. A marble sculpture ofThe Birth of Venusis softly lit in the alcove at the top of the stairs. To her right, Uncle Louie’s office. And to her left, the master bedroom suite.

I tiptoe into the master bedroom. The ornate crystal chandelier overhead is lit to dim.

An emerald-green satin coverlet on the California king, thick wall-to-wall carpeting to match, and elaborate draperies in a tasteful green-and-white silk stripe tied back with white tassels. This is where Saint Patrick’s Day and shag carpeting came to mate and die.

I open the closet door by lifting the decorative knob in the shape of a lion’s head. I’m hit with a blast of White Diamonds. Wrong closet. I close it and lift a second lion’s-head knob on the adjoining door. The scent of Woodhue cologne comes at me like a meteor. I turn on the light and step inside Uncle Louie’s closet. His size 32 three-piece suits hang neatly as though they are fresh out of theJos. A. Bank showroom during their annual sample sale. His shoes, Italian loafers with gold chain links, are lined up on a ceiling-to-floor rack, with sneakers and flip-flops on the bottom. There’s a photo of Aunt Lil in a sexy blouse on the accessories shelf; below it, a photograph of his parents, looking stern on a bocci court in Paterson in the 1950s. They must have lost.

I open drawers. Pressed handkerchiefs. Socks. Briefs. Men’s bikini briefs. Didn’t need to see those. Undershirts. No laptop. I open a cabinet. A spinning rack is loaded with silk ties. Hats on shelves. One shelf for summer holds a few straw palmettos stacked; beneath them, his winter hat, a navy blue Borsalino fedora. I begin to panic, then I ask myself,Where would Louie hide a laptop?

I get down on my knees and peer under the suits. I feel the carpet inside the cabinet on the floor. I follow the seam of the carpet around the inside of the closet. I have a memory of Uncle Louie having me hide cash under the carpet in the Impala when we stopped for lunch once in Ocean City. I didn’t think anything of it because our customers often paid in cash. I pat down the edges, then I feel something hard under the shoe rack. I peel back the carpet and aha! I put the laptop in my bag and make sure that I place everything back where it was.

I back out of the bedroom, leaning down to erase my footprints on the wall-to-wall carpeting with my free hand, remembering that Aunt Lil is particular about impressions in the carpet pile once she has vacuumed.

I hear the drone of my brother and Aunt Lil’s conversation downstairs as I go into Uncle Louie’s office. The draperies are drawn. The walnut desk is polished. Behind the desk is an impressionist painting of the Lake Como boardwalk. On the shelves behind Louie’s desk, on a mirrored display case with glass shelves, are more framed photos of Aunt Lil. On the top shelf, a black-and-whiteeight-by-ten of Uncle Louie at the Playboy Club in Las Vegas in 1975. A Panatela stogie, half-smoked, juts out of his mouth, while his smile is due east of pervy.

I sit down at Uncle Louie’s desk and open a drawer. Rolling Writer pens. The file drawer is filled with order forms, letters, and contracts. I lift them out and place them in the duffel bag on top of the computer. I open the small drawer at the top and pull it out as far as it will go. I find a leather case holding Uncle Louie’s kept marble samples—“tiles,” he called them, to entice customers. When I was a girl, we were allowed to play with the tiles anytime we wished. Calacatta gold is my favorite; it looks like vanilla ice cream with gold swirls through it. The translucent tile glitters when I hold it up to the light.

Uncle Louie explained that the great Italian sculptors chose Calacatta gold because it was porous; they could chisel with ease like it was soft clay. I imagined the quarries in Tuscany as he described them, where the Apuan Alps were hollowed out, leaving open white rooms with walls of Calacatta marble so tall they pierced the clouds. I’m sad all over again when I think he is not here to show me the mountains. There is never a good moment to give up a dream; I’m going to hold on to going to Italy until I can’t.

I find Louie’s address book. Most of the contractors listed don’t have last names. Omar. Dusty. Hiram. There’s a page with the headerCarrara. I find a treasure trove of contacts listed with notes. Family names I may have heard once or twice but would not remember: Tasca, Cellini, Trombetta, Milani, and Apugliaetta. I place the book in the duffel.

Stacked neatly in the drawer in an upright position are fat envelopes of photographs developed at the drugstore. A pocket holds the strips of negatives. I lift out a stack of black-and-white photos framed in a frilly white edge.

Uncle Louie was handsome when he was young and single and on his own in Italy. He would gloss over memories of the arduous work in the quarry; instead, he talked about the food, the family, the camaraderie, the old motorcycle he used to get around, and, of course, the beautiful women. I never knew Uncle Louie to be unhappy, but in these photos, he is blissful. There’s a photograph of Uncle Louie with a young woman I don’t recognize. She has a tumble of black curls and red lips, and she isn’t Aunt Lil. I tuck the photographs into the duffel. My aunt doesn’t need to find old photos with Uncle Louie and a pretty girl that isn’t her.