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“I’m happy for him.” Am I? I think I am.

“Why did he wait to buy a house until after the divorce? I don’t understand. His own mother is mystified.” Mom shakes her head. “A split-level on Ocean Avenue in Bilancia Land isn’t cheap. Go figure.”

“The boulevard side is nicer.” Dad winks at me. “We have the lake.”

“Yeah, but we have bugs in the summer,” Mom says. “Bilancia Land is mostly concrete.”

Daddy looks at me; he puts his finger to his lips, reminding me not to bite. He hates arguing as much as I do.

Oblivious, Mom says, “Bobby told Babe he wanted to buy Giuseppina a house all along.” She says this as though I’m not in the room. “Now he’ll be in a house all alone with the complete set of Haddon Hall china we gave you for your wedding. What’s Bobby gonna do with service for twelve?”

“Philly, knock it off.” My father mixes himself a bourbon and iced tea cocktail. “They’re just dishes.”

“In the history of the institution of marriage, no woman ever walked out with just a suitcase and her cell phone.” She turns awayfrom the fry pan and looks at me. “Your wedding gifts were abandoned like war orphans. Michael Aram picture frames. A Shark vacuum cleaner. I don’t even have the deluxe model! The KitchenAid mixer. Top of the line!”

“Let it go, Phil,” my father says quietly. “We’ve been through all of this.”

I choose to leave the kitchen before this situation snowballs into an avalanche and buries me. In my mother’s version, I am not buried in Alpine snow; death comes after I’m dredged in seasoned breadcrumbs and fried like a chicken cutlet.

I slip down the cellar stairs to my apartment underneath the kitchen. The temperature plunges with every step I take on the narrow stairwell. It’s so cold down here, someday they’ll find me curled up in my sleep like a ring bologna. This apartment was built for Grandma Cap, who died two weeks before she was scheduled to move in. She told me privately that she would rather die than live in our cellar, and so she did.

I skitter around the damp basement, throwing switches to produce heat. I turn on every lamp to brighten the place, including the overhead fixture, which was repurposed from the garage. Never mind it’s meant for exterior use and is so bright I could perform my own appendectomy beneath its beam. It throws cold blue LED light, the kind you find in the parking silo at the mall. When I catch my reflection in the mirror, my skin tone glows an odd blue-green similar to the hue of a varicose vein.

Our basements have two purposes. When we’re not housing someone old or newly divorced, we use them as bonus kitchens and storage units. It is impossible to find an Italian American who ever pays rent at a storage facility. We consider it a waste because we can always store underground. Our family saves everything and discardsnothing, because someday, the item you kept will save the day, be it wax paper from cereal boxes (the perfect size to cool manicotti crepes) or plastic bags (there’s a sack of plastic bags under the sink that rivals the size of the globe of the 1964 World’s Fair) or squares of tinfoil (we haven’t purchased a new roll since 2009). Italian Americans don’t believe in recycling because we never throw anything away. This is why my mother cannot give up hope that I will go back with Bobby. Evidently, we don’t throw people away either.

I sit down on the bed and prop my laptop on a pillow. I open it and log into my Thera-Me account. I can’t wait to tell Dr. Sharon all about my day. Before I type in my password, I stop to think. I’m about to share, with a total stranger at an undetermined location, that I’m going to Italy, and I didn’t tell my parents. Why?

That’s a question for the doctor even though I already know the answer. I fear my parents would convince me not to go. They would be afraid for me in a foreign country. The truth is, they’d be afraid for me in the next county. My parents would have me dead before I got to the airport. Yet I’m dying inside a day at a time in their cellar. I have to tell someone in order to make Italy real because I haven’t been this happy in a very long time. So I type in my password. A stranger with a medical degree is a better confidante than none at all.

I hit enter.

A return message, typed inside a cartoon of the human brain, says:Dr. Sharon is unavailable. Click here to schedule an appointment with Dr. Raymond. Please fill out Exercise 2.

I snap the laptop shut. Dr. Sharon didn’t mention I would be fobbed off to Dr. Raymond! Feeling betrayed, I reach for my phone to make myself feel worse. I look Bobby up on Instagram. I mutedhis account when our divorce became final. Our wedding photos remain on his profile. I go into Messages and send him a text.

It was good to see you, Bobby.

I examine the text as though it is a diamond and I’m trying to predict carat weight. I text,

Miss you.

4

Sunday Dinner

The perfume ofSunday dinnerallaPuglia fills the Baratta family kitchen. After hours on the stove, the gravy creates a symphony of scent, sweet butter, tender basil, and fresh garlic, with a base of our own robust marinara crushed from tomatoes gathered from our gardens. The canning of the tomatoes is a family affair. Our cousins show up every August, their yields in tow, along with their Mason jars, to can the tomatoes on the stove in the cellar. Every family on the lake has their own recipe, with their own particular spin. You know your people by their gravy.

The hearty pot simmers, filled with delicate hand-rolled meatballs, braised pork ribs, crispy chicken thighs, and spicy Italian sausage that poach and thicken the sauce. The rib meat is so tender it falls off the bone as I stir.Perfetto!Grammy B used to eat the bones, leaving the meat for others; this afternoon, in her honor, I may too. Behind the gravy, a high-hat pot roils with salted water awaiting the ravioli. In a covered skillet, broccoli rabe softens in olive oil on a low heat. A tray of stuffed artichokes, steamed this morning, bakes in the oven, blanketed in a mixture of buttery breadcrumbs, freshherbs, and Parmigiano-Reggiano, carved off the wheel from Parma that takes up half a shelf in the refrigerator. I snap a photo of the operation and post it:#marinara to share-a. Maybe Zia Giuseppina wouldn’t have been so angry if her Sunday dinner could’ve been posted on Insta.

“How many we got for dinner, Ma?” I call out to my mother, who irons her mother’s lace tablecloth from Italy on the dining room table in the next room. It was a revelation to watch the servants onDownton Abbeypress the cloth directly on the tabletop with a hot iron. Ever since, we do the same, skipping the ironing board.

“What’s the ravioli count?” my mother hollers back.

“You first.”

“I’m setting the table for fourteen.” Mom places the hot iron on the sideboard to cool. She picks up a stack of her good china (pink-and-gold-rimmed Lady Carlyle) and places the dishes around the table. Mom cranks up Jim Croce’s greatest hits, shaking her hips as she tinkers with the cloth napkins and silverware, placing them just so. I wonder if she senses this is my last Sunday dinner. While the broccoli rabe sautés, I sit down at the counter, pick up my phone, and journal about the moment I decided to change my life for good.

The trees alongthe walkway on the Hudson River in Hoboken were tall and lush with green foliage. Their leaves fluttered like feathers against the backdrop of the silver skyscrapers of Manhattan across the water. The slate-blue sky overhead swirled with tufts of white clouds that matched the foam on the waves of the river as it rolled out to sea.