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always expecting some new marvel, some new excitement just around the next corner.
    Sadly, Matt could not make the trip with us—unforeseen business commitments, he’d said, though I suspect the truth was that he’d wanted Jammy to be the only one with me while I searched for my past. He’d been skeptical about my looking into Jon-Boy’s death, too.
    “Listen, hon,” he’d said before we left, putting an arm around my shoulders and talking quietly. “It’s been what, twenty years now? Face it, Lamour; Jon-Boy just made a mistake; he went out on a boat and got caught in a storm. I don’t know; maybe he’d been drinking . . . a few too many glasses of grappa. . . .” He’d shrugged, knowing he hadn’t convinced me, even though I knew Jon-Boy had been partial to a few too many glasses of grappa, though I’d never seen him drunk. And he
never
went out on boats.
    But now Jammy and I are at the Hotel d’Inghilterra, originally an old palazzo but since 1850 an intimate, antique-filled hotel on the via Bocca di Leone, right in the heart of Rome’s smartest shopping district.
    “How convenient,” was Jammy’s appreciative comment as she sipped her first Roman espresso in the hotel restaurant, quaintly named the Lounge del Roman Garden.
    Tired from the long flight, complete with all the usual air-travel delays, we went up to our pretty room, where we showered, then flung ourselves exhausted into bed. Soon I heard Jammy’s quiet snores. She had always snored, I remembered from childhood. But I found myself unable to sleep. Excitement and apprehension filled my mind. Was I going to find Trastevere the way I remembered it? Or had the memories been enhanced by time, the way they so often are?
    Too much time had passed to find my lovely “grandmothers” still in Trastevere. I wondered who lived in our oldapartment now and whether if I knocked on their door and explained that I used to live there they might allow me to see it again. Just to breathe the same air that Jon-Boy and I had breathed together, smell that slightly musty air of a very old and rather decrepit building would bring back my memories.
    Sleep was impossible. I could wait no longer. And besides, I needed to do this alone. I got up, dressed quickly, and with a last glance at the sleeping Jammy made my way downstairs into the suddenly quiet streets.
    It was lunchtime and Rome had “closed down” for two or three hours. Only the sneakered, backpacking young still thronged the Piazza di Spagna, where I hailed a cab to take me to Trastevere.
    My heart thumped from two jolts of espresso and nerves as each narrow traffic-clogged street brought me closer to my old home. When the cab finally dropped me off at the top of the vicolo del Cardinale, I gazed down its shadowy, empty length, unable for a moment even to move. A tall, slender man emerged from one of the apartments. Without looking my way, he strode off down the alley in the direction of the piazza. My heart skipped a beat. With his long dark hair and loping walk, it might have been Jon-Boy, out searching for me again, lost on my solitary ramblings.
    After that I seemed to see the ghost of my father at every corner. . . a glimpse, a shadow. And I also saw the skinny little pigtailed girl I used to be, skipping down that alley where I now began my walk into the past.
    I stared hopefully up at those old kitchen windows, but there were no more friendly “grandmothers” to wave at me. And the peeling stucco buildings that in my day had sheltered half-a-dozen or so apartments had been gentrified into smart homes with fancy wooden doors. Their polished brass handles gleamed, and the names of the apartment owners hadelectric buzzers next to them instead of the old bell pushes. No lines of laundry hung over the alley, and manicured tubs of flowers lined the fancy pergolas on the rooftop gardens, instead of rusty cans and old pots of wilting greenery.
    I hardly recognized my old building. It was