The Sicilian Inheritance

by Jo Piazza

There was a hell of a lot of grief involved in losing something you built from scratch, in losing the future you expected to have.

His cheeks flushed pink, which was terribly sexy.

One of her babies wailed and Mamma dropped her rag so she could pick him up from the cradle in the corner. She rocked back and forth as she nursed and picked up the rag to wipe crumbs off the table. Papa didn’t lift a finger to help. I saw my future reflected back at me.

She stays invisible to the men so that the women can go to her for what the doctor will not or cannot give them.”

My papa had changed too, but his feelings for me were different from Mamma’s. Before the baby came, he had been proud of who I might turn out to be. Now he looked through me, not unlike the way he looked through my mother and her sisters. I was no longer special to him.

Everyone looked at me and laughed with their mouths wide open because now that Cosimo was one year old they expected me to be pregnant again. I raised my own glass and placed a hand on my belly because that is what they wanted to see me do. The tips of my fingers curled inward, my nails digging into my skin until it was painful.

“The cats keep the souls of the dead,” she remarked to me with a deadpan glare. “Be kind to them.”

“They’ll get theirs. You don’t fuck with the cats here.”

Since becoming a mother, I barely had time to remember all the things I once wanted, all the lives I hoped to lead, but sometimes the desire all flooded back and I felt a small death.

absurd . . . ideas about how a woman should be. Ideas that don’t always agree with one another. It is hard then to know how to act in the world.”

He nodded, pleased to be given a task. I had learned this about men. As headstrong as they could be, they also liked to be told what to do as long as it didn’t question their own intelligence. Men needed to feel useful in a situation they could not control.

The days passed without my noticing them and with no one noticing me. Some of this came out of my mouth. “I don’t know. It was as if no one saw me.” “I saw you.”

Rosalia had warned me that practicing medicine in the public eye would bring both gratitude and scrutiny. “They will be thankful for your work but afraid of your power. Choose who you heal and how.”

I was learning how to protect myself with humility and silence.

Aunt Rose used to tell me that white vinegar could clean anything. She was right, but it also made everything smell like a sad desk salad.

He could accomplish all that he wanted through his mamma, never returning home to clean up his mess.

“A man can always apologize more, can’t he?” “They can. And frankly most of the time they should. But they never do.”

“He’s probably close to one hundred. Our men live forever here. There’s something in the olive oil.” “And your women?” “They die exhausted.”

It is hard to be a historian without becoming a nihilist because you see the worst of history repeat itself over and over again.

These men who once loved me wanted nothing more than my destruction.

I hated him in that moment, but I consoled him anyway.

I finally realized that her secrets and her decisions to share them were about her sense of control. That and the fact that knowledge was currency.

maybe, like many women of her time, she was afraid to venture out of the perfectly constructed world she had created for herself, to discover something that could change everything.

Maybe permanency was not the only metric of success. My marriage didn’t work out, but I got a wonderful daughter out of it. My restaurant was a great success, just not forever because forever is hard. Maybe I couldn’t do it all and be everything to everyone and that had to be OK.

I watched her for maybe a minute more before she pulled out of her driveway, checked her lipstick in her rearview mirror, and blew herself a kiss.