Page 13 of The Sicilian Inheritance

FIVE

SARA

When I was seven and Carla was nine, we spent the first of six entire summers in Scranton with Aunt Rosie. Mom said it was because she worried Rosie was lonely, but we both knew it was because my parents’ marriage was falling apart. Dad had recently taken up with an Outback Steakhouse waitress named Vienna, and Mom and Dad needed space to figure their shit out. Aunt Rosie loved the story about Dad and Vienna, not because she wanted to see my parents break up but because she was dying to know whether the twenty-two-year-old who served Bloomin’ Onions and had stolen my father’s heart was named after the city or the sausage. “Definitely the sausage,” she insisted.

Rosie was well into her seventies by then, still working as a substitute when the school needed her. She didn’t think twice about leaving Carla and me to fend for ourselves. To keep us occupied, she devised elaborate scavenger hunts that took us through the woods, over the creek, and down to Main Street, where we had to perform chores for the store proprietors in exchange for candy or sometimes our lunch. Each morning she’d drop us off at a new destination, driving with her hand out the window, chain-smoking Kools, and listening to Howard Stern. She thought Robin Quivers was the funniest woman on the planet. She’d give us a list of things to find and do for the scavenger hunt and we’d be on our own.

Those summers were the happiest memories of my childhood.

As a grown woman I would wonder whether those treasure hunts were just Rosie’s way of keeping us occupied or whether she was trying to teach us much-needed lessons about how to maneuver in the world, a way of saying, At the end of the day you’re on your own, girls, and you’ve got to survive on your wits.

Was this Sicily trip just another scavenger hunt to her, or did she actually believe there was some mystery to Serafina’s death?

My heart cartwheeled in my chest as I read and reread her note while Pippo slowly made his way up the twisty road toward Caltabellessa. I could practically hear Rosie whispering in my ear, the way she did when I was frustrated with a math problem or a riddle as a child. You’ve fucking got this. She thought nothing of dropping an f-bomb into my impressionable brain.

Within fifteen minutes the legendary village appeared in front of us. It was familiar, like a place I’d been before or visited in a dream, but also like nowhere else I’d ever seen. A single mountain rose above the low rolling hills. At its peak a massive, jagged rock jutted into the sky like the fin of a shark going in for the kill. Whitewashed houses clung precariously to the rocky cliffs and seemed to spill down from the tip of the mountain. If I squinted, I could almost see Daedalus’s maze in the mess of streets. We finally reached the one-lane road that unspooled up to the village in a series of perilous switchbacks. When a car came at us from the opposite direction, Pippo hit the gas. I let out a shriek and grasped onto the dashboard, but Pippo jerked the steering wheel to the left at the very last second, pulling us onto the gravel shoulder.

“Aren’t there rules for who has the right of way on this one-lane road?” I gasped.

He shrugged. “You saw what happened. We figure it out.”

We were hardly back on the road for a few minutes before he stopped again. A flock of thirty or so shaggy goats crossed from one olive grove to another, plodding over the broken concrete road taking all the time in the world. The sun blazed in the midafternoon sky by the time we arrived, which meant siesta had shuttered the town completely.

Pippo parked his Fiat in a lot outside the walls of the oldest part of the city, explaining that he needed a special permit to drive the narrow streets of the village. “We’ll make our way on foot,” he chirped. “It isn’t far.”

From the parking lot we climbed a passage of steep stairs. Then tiny alleyways brought us past a crumbling Roman tower to a small piazza. Flocks of pigeons and a couple of filthy dogs were the only signs of life until I noticed a few young guys slouched in the doorways of gated shops, smoking their cigarettes, staring at us through squinted eyes. Out of habit I picked up my pace. Around another corner two ancient men crouched forward on rickety folding chairs playing dominoes. One of them glanced up at me and murmured, “Dovresti sorridere, bella ragazza.” You should smile, pretty girl.

I’m not pretty, not in any kind of traditional way. I’ve known that most of my life. One of the first things I remember hearing was my mom crooning over how gorgeous my sister, Carla, was, calling her a pretty little angel and a beautiful babe, words she never used to describe me. I was her funny girl, her silly baby. Never beautiful, never brilliant. With those off-the-cuff compliments my mom turned me into a goofy, overthinking perfectionist who was too often aggressively helpful. Funny, silly, helpful. I liked helpful the best. It made me feel needed and when I felt needed I felt loved.

Carla was the one who insisted I was beautiful in a “peculiar way” after she found a treasure trove of pictures of Anjelica Huston and Jack Nicholson from the seventies in Aunt Rosie’s old gossip magazines that she kept stashed in the attic. “You look like her,” my sister insisted. “The pointy chin, sensual lips, long nose, and the eyes that are sort of too far apart but in a really interesting way. She’s so hot. And she was with the most unavailable man in Hollywood. Look how sexy the two of them are. I would make out with both of them.”

It wasn’t until I met my husband in my twenties and he was entranced by my height, my broad shoulders and odd features, that I ever felt beautiful in a man’s eyes.

Pippo and I passed a stone church with a massive wooden door the height of at least two men. He made the sign of the cross. To the left of the church a rust-covered iron fence bore the sign cimitero.

“Is this the main cemetery here?” I asked him. He gazed up at the church and pulled a crumpled Google map from his back pocket.

“I do not know this town very good,” he apologized, consulting the paper. After a minute he smiled. “Yes. It does appear to be the only cemetery in town. Would you like to visit it now?”

I wanted to sleep, to eat, to call my daughter again, but Aunt Rosie’s latest request rattled around in my brain. Find out what really happened to my mother. Wouldn’t Serafina’s grave be the right place to start? Her headstone would, at the very least, confirm the date of her death, maybe more. As I walked down the path, Pippo gripped my arm with an unexpected intensity.

“Hey,” I shouted, wiggling free.

“You cannot just walk in to visit the dead. We must ask permission.”

“From the dead?”

“From the church.” Pippo looked me up and down. His eyes landed on my bare arms and shoulders, on my tattoos, a pro-series meat cleaver on my left forearm and the La Macellaia flying pig on the right. He handed me two black scarves from his bag. “Cover your shoulders and hair as a sign of respect.” He grabbed the handle on the massive door and pulled it open with no small amount of exertion. The church was empty and freezing. Gas lanterns perched in the nooks and crannies of the rock, throwing shadows against the wall that looked like angels. It was all grayish white stone. Stone walls, stone floors, stone altar, stone pews.

“The stone probably all came from inside this mountain,” Pippo said, waving his hand around the room. A man in a dark cassock hunched over the altar. Pippo cleared his throat once, twice, and on the third the figure rose and turned to us.

The ancient priest moved like a wounded animal, dragging a leg behind him as he shuffled toward us. He said nothing until he was so close that I could smell him, the scents of incense, cigarette smoke, and decay. Pippo bowed his head in reverence. I did the same and felt ridiculous.

The hunched-over figure peered at us with rheumy black eyes, filmy like a dog’s that was about to be put down. But when he spoke his voice was filled with fire and his eyes set on me with a profound weariness. I couldn’t make out a word. When he stopped, Pippo translated his rushed dialect.

“He’s mad that I brought an outsider into the sanctum without permission. This space is for those who live in town. I will tell him you are not really an outsider. You have family from here.” Pippo spoke and I heard the names Marsala and Giovanni, Forte and Serafina.

Smoke from the many candles and incense caught in my throat and I coughed, bringing the men’s conversation to a halt.

---