“He’s such a sweetie,” I murmured to Frannie, still wishing she’d indulge in a romance or harmless flirtation. “I’m going to give him the biggest tip known to mankind.”

“You do that, Mom,” Frannie said with a patient smile. Her brown eyes shone with an emotion I hadn’t glimpsed before, but Allegra’s question gave me no time to probe.

“Hey, Nonni, is this the section where your mom and dad lived?”

“It is close. My mother lived in Quartieri Spagnoli, which is a working-class neighborhood. My father was from Vomero, which was a bit more for the middle class. They got married here and eventually moved to America, where I was born. There were many Italian families who lived in the neighborhood in Queens with us. We all became close.”

“They were madly in love,” Allegra said, with a spark in her eyes.

“Yes, they were,” I said, patting her shoulder. I loved how my granddaughter was just as fascinated by the story of their love affair as I’d been. My father was extremely handsome, with piercing dark eyes, a trim mustache, and a slim figure. He towered like a giant at six-four, different from the average height of most Italian men. He met my mother in a café and told me about her yellow dress and how it twirled around her legs when she moved, and her dark hair that fell to her waist like a curtain of silk. After they married, they decided to move for something better. It was hard to make a good living in Naples, and they dreamed of America. Every anniversary, my mother would don the yellow dress, my father a suit, and they’d put on music and dance in the small kitchen together to mark the day they fell in love.

I stopped walking, allowing the grief to pass through me. God, I missed them so much. It had been cruel to lose both of them so young. Fran turned toward me, not realizing I was thinking of an entirely different story. “So, it was like that when you met Daddy, right? You always said you knew very young you were going to marry him.”

The past reared up in all its ugly beauty. I’d learned early on that there was no way to remove one piece from your life. Like a puzzle, the missing piece only caused a gaping hole and ended up incomplete. No, you had to take each piece and accept it in order to look at your journey with a clear vision of the whole. I’d made peace with my decisions a long time ago. I wasn’t about to question them now.

But maybe it was time Frannie knew the girl I used to be. Before I became a mother and a wife.