Carmela Planeta’s husband went away to work in coal mines in a place called Alabama. At first, he sent money but then six months passed with nothing. Carmela asked Marco to find some way to contact the Italian consulate. It took many more months for Marco to discover that Carmela’s husband had at first fallen ill and been unable to work, and then, when he was healed, he took to drink and never went back to the mines. Carmela was essentially a widow without a dead husband, a purgatory of sorts. “I wish he’d died in the mine,” she said. We all understood her words even though we thought she
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