One Italian Summer

by Rebecca Serle

Never throw away a good pair of jeans. Always have fresh lemons on hand. Bread keeps for a week in the fridge and two months in the freezer. OxiClean will take out any stain. Be careful of bleach. Linen is better than cotton in the summer. Plant herbs, not flowers. Don’t be afraid of paint. A bold color can transform a room. Always arrive on time to a restaurant and five minutes late to a house.

My mother loved the New York Times on a Sunday, and an iced coffee in the afternoon. My father loved what she did.

How did I not inherit any of her capability? The only person who would know how to handle her death is gone.

I want to see what she saw, what she loved before she loved me. I want to see where it was she always wanted to return, this magical place that showed up so strongly in her memories.

Impossibly, the woman at the desk is my mother. “Mom,” I whisper, and then the world goes black.

I am struck with the overwhelming clarity of how good it feels to exist, to be wanted and… not known. To have a man look at me who hasn’t seen me wan and laid out with the stomach flu, or folded over on the first day of my period. And even better—how it feels to look at someone whose shape and mind and history are not familiar to me.

He nods, considering. And then all at once he’s close to me. Are our chairs this close? It’s like he’s separate, like I can see all of his details, all of his specific, individual parts, and then he’s right here, indistinguishable. A blur of smell and skin and pulse. “I’d like to kiss you,” he says. I hear it in my rib cage. “But I’m not going to unless you tell me it’s okay. I know you’re in a weird spot. I also know we’re here, and there is a very big full moon, and your lips look like watermelon. The good kind. The breakfast kind.” Wherever we are, my words aren’t here. I just find the one. “Okay.”

There is more to life than just continuing to do what we know. What got you here won’t get you there.

“It’s possible actions only have the weight we give them,” she says. “We can decide what something means.”