The hills rolled away in soft gold and green. Cypress trees rose like brushstrokes against the sky. Below us, somebody was carrying plates through an open doorway, and somewhere in the square a violin was playing something slow and bright at the same time. Lorine was across from me, writing in a little travel journal she had bought at the airport and already nearly filled.
“You’re smiling again,” she said without looking up.
“I know.”
I did.
I had smiled at things all through the trip. Laundry drying between old stone buildings. An espresso so strong it made my eyes water. A church bell at noon. Two women arguing over peaches at a market stall. The way old cities make you feel both tiny and strangely vindicated for lasting this long.
James should have been there.
That grief did not disappear just because I was happy. It sat beside the happiness, gentler now, like an old ache before rain. I thought of him constantly. I thought of the trip we never took, of all the years after he died when I turned my whole life into a waiting room for other people’s needs. I thought of how astonished he would have been—not that I went to Italy, but that it took me this long to choose myself.
My phone buzzed.
A photograph from Rebecca: her tiny kitchen, now fixed up with a blue runner rug and a basil plant on the windowsill.
Grandma, can’t wait to show you everything when you get back. Hope Italy is as beautiful as you imagined.
I smiled and sent her a picture of the hills.
More beautiful, I typed. And I brought my appetite.
A minute later, the phone buzzed again.
Garrett.
His name stayed on the screen.
Once, that would have pulled me out of the sunset, out of the meal, out of myself. Once, I would have answered on the first ring, heart already racing, mind already reorganizing around whatever he needed.
I looked at the name.
Then I turned the phone face down on the table.
Not from cruelty.
Not from revenge.
Simply because I was in Tuscany, the wine was good, the evening was beautiful, and whatever Garrett had to say could wait until morning.
That was the whole revolution right there.
Not the bank forms. Not the canceled drafts. Not the arguments in my living room.
This.
The ability to let my son be a grown man for one evening while I remained a grown woman in my own life.
Lorine raised her glass.
“To James,” she said softly. “Who would be proud of you.”
I lifted mine.
“To James,” I said.