Six months before my father disappeared, temperatures fell and the villa turned cold. To buy firewood, we drove to a small compound on the other side of Florence where a group of men sat playing cards under a canopy. One of them rose and beckoned us to drive the car over a steel square set into the ground, a vehicle scale. He pointed to a pile of chopped wood, indicating it was up to us to load it. When we had shoved as much wood as we possibly could into our rented Renault, the car was weighed again. We paid for it by the kilo. As we drove away, the men resumed their card game, and my father waved. “Tough job.”
We stoked the wood-burning stove day and night to keep the house warm, but the smoke triggered my mother’s asthma, forcing her to take inhalers twice a day. When that didn’t help, the local doctor prescribed prednisone, and though it helped my mother breathe, it also made her agitated, hungry, simultaneously weepy and furious. She and my father argued every night. She wanted to leave Florence. She wanted to know why we had come to Italy in the first place if all he was going to do was work. Couldn’t we move someplace else for the spring?
“We can’t just take Leah out of school mid-year,” my father told her. “Besides, we signed a lease.”
“We can break the lease.”
“Why don’t you take a trip?” he suggested. “Someplace the air is clean. And when you come back, it’ll be spring, and we won’t have to burn wood anymore.”
My mother found a cooking school in Sardinia, and she convinced Margot to go with her. They would spend February and part of March learning to make handmade pastas and sauces. She showed us the brochure, a photo showing noodles hanging in the sun like laundry. “If we stay six weeks, we get a certificate of completion, issued by the government.”
After my mother left for Sardinia, my father became “Roberto.” Every afternoon, when he picked me up at school, the model-moms congregated around him like he was a rare species of husband. They laughed at his Italian. They became his teachers. They taught him where to shop: the best book and wine sellers, the best markets for leather briefcases, the best cashmere sweaters. They talked him into getting new eyeglass frames and went with him to help him choose. They planned parent field trips to villages nearby, places my mother had wanted to visit, places my father had promised to go to with her when his book was finished. Sometimes my father and the model-moms were late coming to pick us up after their field trips. One afternoon, Aria and I exited the school to find her mother and my father standing alone at the edge of the parking lot. “Your father’s a ten,” she told me. “Tens need other tens.”
I felt a terrible ache each night when my mother called and my father didn’t mention his outings, as if my silence regarding his budding friendships with the model-moms somehow made me complicit. Instead we listened to my mother describe what she’d prepared that day: “Orecchiette with pistachio pesto and fresh peas. I’ll make it for you when I get home.” She and Margot were supposed to share a room to cut down on the cost of the school, but right away they had begun bickering. By the end of the first week, Margot had left. “She didn’t even say good-bye,” my mother confided over the phone. “She just disappeared and left me to pay the entire cost of room and board.”
My father told her not to worry. “If it helps your asthma, we can afford it. Stay until the end.”