Chapter 124
EVEN WITHOUT THE TREE LIGHTING, my mother and I stayed busy, going to all my favorite bars and bakeries and gelaterias. We bought panettone at the Comiti Uno and Christmas lights at the hardware store, and by the time she’d been on the island for a couple of days, she told me she felt like a local.
Francesca insisted I bring her to my Tuesday lesson, where we didn’t speak a word of Italian, because what would have been the point? Instead, Francesca made us coffees, and I sat by and watched as these two important women in my life got acquainted.
It was no great surprise that they hit it off.
Francesca was generous with the compliments, and what mother doesn’t love hearing her child praised?
“Your daughter has a beautiful accent,” Francesca told my mother, who nodded along enthusiastically, as if this were an attribute that had been obvious since birth.
For most of the hour, Francesca peppered my mother with questions.
She wanted to know what I was like as a little girl, if I had been a rebellious teenager, and what my mother had thought when I’d brought Paul home.
“You must have hated him for taking her halfway around the world,” she said, and it occurred to me that she was really trying to suss out what my mother thought about Paul, period.
“No, no,” said my mother diplomatically. “We were glad for Eileen to have this opportunity.”
That might have been the final word on the subject, but Francesca did that thing where she sat very still and didn’t say anything. Eventually, the silence became uncomfortable enough that my mother kept talking.
“It’s not that we don’t miss her,” she said. “Of course we do. But Paul’s a good partner for her. He’s very… driven.”
“Yes,” said Francesca, and I knew what she was thinking: If all my mother could say about my husband was that he was driven, she was not, in fact, enamored with him.
“Tell her about the work you’re doing with the families,” I suggested to Francesca, which was my attempt to change the subject.
Francesca talked some about the petition, which they’d submitted to City Council in early December. “Nothing will come of it,” she admitted, “but you have to do what you can.”
She and I had had an awkward lesson or two after I’d refused to sign the petition, but I’d pushed past it, determined not to let the standoff come between us.
Still, it wasn’t until I suggested the families stage a walk in Cagliari to coincide with the next legislative session of the Regional Council that I earned my way back into Francesca’s good graces.
“They’re having a lot of success pitching the story to bigger papers,” I explained to my mother, and Francesca told her about an article that had recently appeared in Il Messaggero.
“Those poor families,” said my mother.
Francesca agreed. “Paul keeps telling your daughter there is nothing to fear. But if there is nothing to fear, why not be more transparent?”
My mother clucked accordingly, then fixed me with a long stare, and I wondered if she was thinking about the time last April when I’d called her, sobbing. “It does seem hard to get to the bottom of this business.”
After we said goodbye to Francesca, my mother treated me to lunch at Osteria da Liò. We ordered calamari and plates of nero di seppia, which was a squid ink pasta—almost black in color and so briny it made your mouth water.
“It’s very tricky,” I said, pointing to the menu.
“See that dish? The linguine all’aragosta?
It’s a pasta with lobster meat. But the lobsters aren’t like American lobsters.
They’re big and spiny, and the price you see next to it—it’s not for the whole meal.
It’s for an etto of lobster meat, which is the equivalent of a hundred grams. If you order it, they’ll come out and show you the lobster, and then you can decide how much meat you want. ”
I told her how, shortly after we’d arrived on the island, Paul and I had inadvertently spent close to twenty-five dollars on two plates of lobster linguine.
“Oh my God. I would have died. When did you realize what you’d done?” asked my mother.
“Not until the bill came, and by then it was too late.”
I don’t know why I brought the story up.
It wasn’t a happy memory. Paul thought there’d been some mistake and called over the waiter to get him to fix it.
When we realized that, no, there was no mistake, Paul grew angry and refused to pay.
“He knew we were Americans,” he fumed, while the waiter ran to get the owner of the restaurant.
In the end, Paul got the owner to agree that the waiter should have warned us, and to make it right, he charged us what he’d paid for the lobster wholesale, which was still more than we’d anticipated spending.
The whole thing had left a sour taste in my mouth, and I’d been too embarrassed to set foot in the restaurant again, with or without Paul.
My mother must have read some of this on my face because she asked what Francesca had meant earlier when she’d said that Paul wasn’t being transparent.
“There’s a group of Italian researchers on the island, doing a bunch of environmental testing to see if the subs are safe,” I said.
“You told me about the babies with the birth defects.”
“Yeah, well, these researchers… their job would be made infinitely easier if Paul’s division shared its test results with them, or at the very least told them what they should be testing for. Like specific radionuclides.”
“Isn’t all of that top secret?”
“Yeah,” I said, “it is, but they’re not asking for all the details. They just want to stop spinning their wheels.”
“Is that even Paul’s call to make? Giving them the information?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s way above his head. But he’s definitely of the opinion that you never share more than you have to.”
“What do you think?”
I let out a long sigh. “I guess, in general, I’m beginning to think a little transparency would be a good thing.”