The Sicilian Inheritance

by Jo Piazza

Every couple of meters she stooped to pet one of the stray cats that had formed a kind of parade behind us. “The cats keep the souls of the dead,” she remarked to me with a deadpan glare. “Be kind to them.”

“I am very finished with men,” Giusy declared. “I was married to one once. That was enough.”

my ever-optimistic husband who doted on everything our daughter did, who took on much less of the mental load and just assumed that all parental love was exponential.

“But it still makes no sense to me why a generations-old grudge against my relative has anything to do with the sale of land right now.” “Welcome to Sicily. Holding and maintaining grudges is our national pastime. It’s our golf.”

Sicily is still the sad forgotten stepbrother of Italian tourism. Americans all want to see the canals in Venice even though I have heard they smell like a pig’s ass. They want the Colosseum and that stupid tower that is not straight.”

His hazelnut skin glistened with sweat and oil. When he looked up at us, I was nearly undone by his wide, sensuous mouth and eyes the color of a pond after a fresh rainstorm, light brown with a hint of moss at the edges. His facial features could have been chiseled in stone, made all the more delicious by his lazy smile.

I slid a date stuffed with pistachios and a creamy white cheese between my lips and groaned in pleasure at the salty sweetness melting on my tongue. “It is better than an orgasm,” Giusy said. She wasn’t wrong.

“How can a woman ever prove her innocence?” I asked.

He poured two plastic cups full of wine as we finished the bread, the olives, and the cheese. Few things in life are as fundamentally satisfying as good, quick sex followed by a meal of mostly salty cheese.

I also devoured Little Novels of Sicily by Giovanni Verga.