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York City, Etta.” Jack winks at me.
    “You don’t have to be slick. You just need to move fast and cuss and push people out of your way,” Etta tells him with great authority.
    “Etta knows all about New York. She’s read
Harriet the Spy
about seventeen times.”
    “You and your mama will do fine without me.”
    I’ve made Etta’s favorite dinner: spaghetti in fresh tomato sauce with meatballs, a big salad, and brownies with vanilla ice cream for dessert. She clears the dishes without a fuss.
    “You girls got mail.” Jack comes in from the hallway with the familiar blue airmail envelopes. Etta practically dives on her father for her letter. “I forgot about them in my pocket, they’re so thin,” Jack apologizes.
    “It’s from Chiara!” Etta shrieks. “Here, Ma. You got one from Grandpop.”
    “Those two keep the Italian mail service in business.” My husband takes the newspaper and goes into the living room.
    “No kidding.” I rip into my father’s letter. It is full of news. Papa and his new wife, Giacomina, are getting along great, but his mother is causing her share of agita. Nonna is having a hard time letting Giacomina take over the household. Papa says the negotiations continue; I guess Jack isn’t the only man in the world who plays referee to two women. Papa has been down to Bergamo quite a bit and over to see my mother’s family, the Vilminores, on Via Davide. There’s even an update on Stefano Grassi, an orphan my zia Antonietta cared for as though he were her son. After she died, the rest of the Vilminore family began to look out for him. He’d come for dinner and help Zio Pietro in the wood shop, though he continued to live at the nearby orphanage. He is a few years older than Etta, and she developed a big crush on him during our last visit. Evidently, the Barbari family has as well: Papa took Stefano to the opera with Giacomina and has included a picture of the three of them on the steps of Teatro alla Scala in Milan.
    “Stefano Grassi sure is cute.” I give Etta the picture.
    “Ma, he is Major Cute,” Etta corrects me. And she’s right. He’s lanky with a great face, a straight prominent nose, dark eyes, and blond curls that make him look like a Renaissance poet. “Stefano is way more mature than the boys around here.”
    “He wants to come and work in the States next summer. He’s studying building and architecture and wants to apprentice with Dad,” I tell her.
    “Ma, can he come? Please?” Etta lights up like a Roman candle.
    “We’ll have to ask your dad. But I don’t see why not.”
    Etta sits down and studies the picture. “That’s the famous opera house La Scala,” I tell her.
    “I like Italy better than Big Stone.”
    “You do?”
    “Maybe not better. I love my friends and my school and everything. But I miss our family over there. Like Grandpop. He’s the only grandparent I have.”
    “We don’t have a lot of kin around here anymore, do we?”
    “Only Aunt Cecilia. And she’s about four hundred years old.”
    “Well, your dad was an only child, and I’m an only child—”
    “I know, I know, and you got married later in life, and therefore you didn’t have lots of kids like people that get married when they’re young.”
    “Who says that?”
    “You do. All the time.” Etta smiles. “Is it okay if I keep the picture?” I tell her it’s fine, and she goes up to her room. I suddenly feel like following her and explaining every choice I’ve ever made, how not every one was designed to deprive her of siblings and cousins, noise and competition and long waits for the bathroom, but rather the result of chance or luck or fate that blew through my life, woke me up, and changed my single path to this married one, and then unexpectedly, delightedly, to motherhood. But I am not going to justify my choices tonight. And I certainly can’t explain her brother’s death and the fundamental changes it wrought. I don’t know how to tell a twelve-year-old