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“What? I’m going to dinner.”

Smokey doesn’t shift her gaze. She steadies it.

“Angelo is taken, okay? He has a girlfriend. He is off the table. I kissed him but it wasn’t a big deal. It was a goodbye thing. This is strictly a social call. Dinner with no strings.”

Smokey doesn’t believe me. She jumps off the sink and goes to the living room. I sink into the steamy water and suds up to my chin. I float, weightless in the bubbles. I’ve taken more baths in Carrara than I had in total for my entire life in Lake Como, New Jersey. I missed something I never had. That’s a topic for my next therapy session.

“I am a bath person,” I say out loud. “Not a shower person.”

I send a return text to Detective Campovilla as I float in the tub.

As much as I would love to talk to you tonight, I have plans with a truffle I dug with my own hands out of the earth in Siena. I appreciate your patience. May I speak to you about Rolando Gugliotti at another time?

I place the phone on the fluffy towel and sink back down into the water. The bubbles pile up on the surface of the water in silver mounds. What was I doing all these years, denying myself a soak in a hot tub with Calabrian orange bubble bath, as if soap, soaking, and pleasure have to be rationed? Installation after installation, I would marvel at a bathtub’s beauty, then walk out of the customer’s home and return to my deprivation state as though it was what I deserved. I must view life as a slog, a pain parade like the Crusades, where beating myself up eventually earns me a spot in paradise. Why would I wait? Catholic girls suffer now so we don’t have to pay later, I remind myself. It took me thirty-four years to realize that a desire I had all along was, in fact, a need.

I get out of the tub, dry off quickly, and go to the therapy notes I keep on the phone. I type:I need a bathtub wherever I live. Non-negotiable.I write.

Uncle Louie andI were stuck in traffic on the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel. We were headed to the D&D Building to pick up a gold spigot and matching handles, levers, and hose for a posh bathroom installation in Franklin Lakes. Uncle Louie seized the opportunity to counsel me on the same day my final divorce papers arrived from the attorney’s office. I carried them in my work tote as though they were renderings for a job. I was reading through them in the car when Uncle Louie said, “You can go back to Bobby, you know.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Maybe he doesn’t get you, but he doesn’t hit you either.”

“That’s a low bar.”

“I dated a girl out of Newark who used to beat me with her umbrella. The drought in Jersey in spring 1969 was a true Godsend. We got along so nice in dry heat.”

“I can’t believe you went all the way to Newark for a date.”

“There is no distance too far when a man wants a woman. He’ll stand on a bus for six hours just to get to a girl. And he won’t complain about it. I would know. I didn’t have a car.”

“She must have been quite a girl.”

“Had her charms. Until they weren’t so charming. No regrets.” Uncle Louie took his hands off the wheel and made praying hands before returning them to steer. “How about you?”

“I need a storage locker for my regrets. I did everything wrong. I wish I would’ve lived somewhere besides Lake Como before I got married. Don’t care where. Or how far. Sea Girt. Philly. Somewhere. My view of the world was not so different two blocks over with my husband than it was from my bedroom window of my parents’ house. Maybe if I’d had some perspective, I would have made better decisions.”

“You’d have made different ones. Not necessarily better. We can all go back and try to rewrite the past, and of course, if we could, we’d try to fix it and have things go our way, but who knows if that would have made us happy? Do-overs are a crapshoot. Snake eyes.”

“You told me that the time you spent away from Lake Como helped you appreciate it when you came home.”

Louie nodded. “Italy changed me for sure. But it was no Perillo tour. It was hard work, and I got my heart broken overthere. But I guess that was meant to be. Never look back. It only hurts your neck and breaks your heart.” Uncle Louie tapped his wedding band against the steering wheel.

“Do you ever feel suffocated by your choices?”

“I have days where I feel a little snug. I have obligations. Trying to live up to my father’s dream. Tradition is a weighted blanket. It feels secure, but it limits your movement. It always worried me that you went to school with Bobby Bilancia, then you started going with him when you were in college, and then you married him. I think you needed a little exposure to a wider world and different people.”

“Now you tell me?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“I wish I would’ve known what I was looking for.”

“How can you know until you try it? It didn’t work out. Sometimes things don’t. When it works out, you stay. All I know about marriage I learned from my wife. Lil is on my side. Always has been. You give up some things and you get some things when you make a commitment. Who needsunpleasantafter a day of working with customers? Agreeable is important to me.”

“Agreeable.Jane Austen’s favorite character trait. Rosamund Pike gavePride & Prejudicea great read. I’ll download it.”

“Only if you want me to fall asleep behind the wheel. Those books are a snooze on tape. Too much letter writing and delivering mail on horseback. Plus, the sad girl always gets the guy in the end. And the guy always has money.” Uncle Louie thought. “Not that a happy ending is a bad thing.”