Almost Amore

My grandfather came to us when he was 76 to ask our permission to remarry. “Every man needs a woman,” he said. True for some, but obviously, not for all. “She’s not much to look at, but she’s a clean woman, a good woman,” he informed us. He failed to mention that she wasn’t all that bright or that she had already been widowed before and was currently collecting miner’s pensions from three previous husbands who had died. Eventually she would add my grandfather’s to the mix and then marry yet again. We learned that she had many grown children, and even great-grandchildren. My mother shrunk away from Nonno’s new wife’s lack of class and intellect, but I marveled over how she could watch silently and patiently as someone’s knitting needles clacked to form a complex design, and then instantly, almost magically, absorb the pattern’s secrets into her fingers. She talked my grandfather who had paid cash for everything his entire life into a credit card, never mind that he always paid it off immediately. All those children and children’s children and their children treated him as if had always been their patriarch. My father became their prince and I a dignitary’s daughter. My mother remained a tourist. Both she and I had not yet traced the code for belonging anywhere.

Cinse Bonino
2024