The Sicilian Inheritance

by Jo Piazza

never realized how much I would miss this little creature until I could no longer see her whenever I wanted, until my custody of her hung in the balance.

This gorgeous, brilliant child of mine truly thought I was the best despite all recent evidence to the contrary.

It happened bit by bit, and then all at once.

gorgeous cursive that only ancient nuns could beat into you.

I’d always assumed she was sick of living with men after raising three of them.

My great-aunt loved a fucking limerick.

Whenever any of us went on a trip she insisted we bring her back a mug.

Generations of women before me had lived their entire lives circling the tip of the small mountain doing nothing but caring for babies and husbands. For me that life seemed the worst kind of prison.

spectacularly perfect as the sapphire sea emerging from the edge of the soft pine forest.

one. I stretched out on a chair like a wild cat in a warm patch of sun and listened to the waves lap against the shore. I knew it was exactly what heaven would feel like.

“I don’t know. Maybe no one. I want to at least go away to school before I think about marriage.”

Rosie had understood from the very start that I needed one person to love me a little bit more than they loved my sister.

Saint Rita’s down by the baseball stadium

The picture had come to represent what can happen when, for once in your life, you thought you actually deserved all the nice things that were happening to you. In the end I had wanted too much. I wanted success and love, a career and a child, a marriage and freedom. I’d wanted it all and I’d ended up with nothing.

The restaurant failed because of me and in spite of me. Both things can be true.

drove us through the night to Montreal just to try a specific poutine, painted

That’s what I told myself every time I left her, that I was modeling what a strong, successful woman looked like and wasn’t that as important as any of the other parts of parenting?

Papa didn’t lift a finger to help. I

Everyone knew a man was useless around a tiny baby. The winter grew frigid and sometimes

Outback Steakhouse

liked helpful the best. It made me feel needed and when I felt needed I felt loved.

“Was she? Or was she a brilliant woman with the ability to turn men to stone when they abused her or tried to take everything away from her?”

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

There were brief moments like this one when mothering presented the same challenges I’d been given in school and rewarded me with the same small pleasures.

had once wanted to read great books and write down all my thoughts. I wanted to debate big ideas and understand why our small island, so rich in so many ways, remained so poor in all the ways that mattered to the rest of the world.

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.

“Melina is a nasty beast who is not fit to carry your shoes,” I had told her over and over. “I don’t even know how Marco can stand to be around her. He’s so kind and wonderful and she is truly wretched.”

In the moment, it was a life I could love. —

He had become less familiar to me than any of the other men in the village and frankly our little family had done fine in his absence as long as he continued to send the money to keep us clothed and fed.

threw back a gulp of the wine, knowing I shouldn’t, knowing that once I passed a certain threshold the lights would go off in my brain.

“Many men here think they can treat me like shit because they know I live alone.”

knew what it was to serve people. I also knew how invisible a woman could be when she was providing a service. I

wondered whether my restaurant ultimately failed because I took too much time away to be a mom or whether I was always failing at motherhood because I worked too hard on my business.

All I knew for sure was that at the end of each day I felt the crushing weight of wishing I’d done better in both of my roles,

Both of us had jobs that looked successful on paper but there was no cash to show for it. A nanny

“We need a third parent,” I said. “I want a wife.”

name? “Someone will need to take my place

lawyer and

Alabama.

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.

bring me delight, the vastness of it, the possibilities if one was lucky enough to cross it and go somewhere new.

What a complicated question. I was not unhappy in those years before I worked with Rosalia and healed the villagers. I was too busy with the work of being a new mother to be unhappy. Instead, I felt like I did not exist. I lived and moved only to keep my babies alive. Children, chores, and church. Church, chores, and children. 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.”

hadn’t been drinking much wine since my babies were born. It often gave me a headache, but I welcomed the lightness it brought me.

They were the kind of ancient metal braces that Carla and I had as teenagers, not the near invisible modern version that kids and vain housewives get today. He

We’d punch in numbers and flip it over so that it read boobies on the screen, the most hilarious joke I knew at age six. Raguzzo tapped in number after number, consulting the papers in front of him several times.

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.”

All of us wondered why we didn’t do this more often, why we gathered like this only when someone died. The answer was that we never had the time.

We had our children and now we had our work, the butchering, the bricklaying, the baking, and, for me, the medicine.

“I like feeling useful outside of my home and you know what?” I chimed in, my tongue loose but not regretful. “I don’t miss my husband.” The

is on friends that one depends to get along in life.