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“Understood. We can make the argument that Uncle Louie intended to pay the taxes eventually, that he was just holding the money there.”

“Can you do that?”

“I will try.” Joe sighs. “Can you do something for me?”

“Anything.”

“Mom and Dad miss you. They’re worried.”

The longer I’m in Italy, the easier it has become to leave Lake Como behind.

“Can you send Mom and Dad a text, a note? Anything?” Joe asks.

“I will think about it.”

I thank my brother and hang up the phone. The cold air reminds me of autumn in New Jersey a year ago. I open the notes app to write what I remember when I was with Uncle Louie and Mom.

Uncle Louie, Mom,and I stood on the wet ground in front of the Capodimonte plot at Saint Catharine’s Cemetery. The family stone was high-polish Calacatta Nero embossed with gilded letters. The stone itself was shaped like a door, a door that leads, I was told when I was a girl, to heaven. “Do the right thing, and paradise is yours,” Grandma Cap used to say.

My Capodimonte ancestors, Philomena, Luigi, Maria Luisa, and Zia Giuseppina, lay behind the family marker. UncleLouie’s and Aunt Lil’s headstones were already in the ground. Our patch of this hallowed ground was manicured like the back nine at the Upper Montclair Country Club.

“Even in death, appearances matter,” Uncle Louie said as he and my mother stood at the foot of their mother’s newly installed headstone, made of coordinating black onyx marble with gold matte letters. Uncle Louie brushed a few stray fall leaves off the tombstone. “What do you think?”

“It’s lovely, Uncle Louie,” I assured him.

“Philly? You approve?” Louie asked gently.

“She was a saint.” Mom dabbed her eyes.

Whenever a family member in the Cap and Baratta families died, once the funeral Mass was over, we submitted the deceased for sainthood. We threw out all facts and rewrote their life story. Villains became heroes, heroes became saints, and once you were a saint, we prayed to you to intercede for us in heaven. You were assigned a role on the other side as surely as you had one here.

Uncle Louie stood back and squinted at the new marker. “I think Ma would like it.” His eyes filled with tears at the thought, and a breeze kicked up. The dried leaves on the ground took flight like winning lottery tickets in a drum. My macho-ish Uncle Louie could blame his tears on the cold wind. I didn’t need an excuse. Soon it would be Thanksgiving, a reminder of all we had lost, including my grandparents. Whether Baratta or Cap, we had a hard time letting go of those we loved, almost as much as our anger.

“I want you two to make up,” Uncle Louie announced out of the blue, as though the idea had fallen out of the lavender sky like a paper star. “I am tired of the fighting. Life is too short. It’stime. Right out here, in the open air, in this sacred place with no one but Ma listening to you.Talk.”

Mom spoke first. “I don’t know how you could still be mad at me when I am grieving the loss of my mother.”

“I am grieving the loss of my grandmother too.”

“I’m sorry for all of us,” Mom said quietly.

“But Grandma Cap didn’t go behind your back to Grammy B when you were having trouble with Dad. She remained loyal to you. Her daughter.”

Mom turned to me. “Your father and I had our issues. I do not deny that. When I was a newlywed, I had a nervous breakdown.”

“What?” I was not happy to hear that there was a history of mental illness in my family, though I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Uncle Louie patted his hands as though he was kneading imaginary dough, encouraging me to take down the temperature and listen.

Mom nodded and reached into her coat and under her bra strap to retrieve a fresh tissue. “I went to see Father Rausch and he said he’d get me an annulment.” Mom flashed her black eyes my way. “Did you apply for yours yet?”

“I am not spending five thousand dollars on an annulment when my car won’t start.”

“In the end, your father and I stayed together. Obviously. We pushed through a very dark time, and eventually, we loved harder than ever on the other side of my breakdown. I had Joe and Connie, and then you, the surprise.”

“I thought your dream was to have three children.”

“I wanted you to feel included in the master plan, but the truth is, we didn’t see you coming. But there you were, and youbrought us nothing but joy—once you were out of the NICU and could breathe on your own.”