“Are you going to get in, little man?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“I could push you in,” she teased.

Alessio turned to her with a grin. “I’ll push you in.”

She smiled. “I better not then.” She rubbed his head. “Hey, guess what? I got a letter from Grandma.”

“Oh.”

“She says she misses you. They just had the big Pioneer Days rodeo. Everyone in town was there. She said that she wished you were there too.”

Alessio kicked at a leaf that floated near him on the water’s surface.

“You know, the rodeo was always my favorite time of the year. Right up there with Christmas. We’d all dress up in our jeans and boots and cowboy hats. Some of the guys had belt buckles this big.” She brought her hands together at her waist to form an oval only slightly exaggerated to the size of a football. “We’d play games and eat. We’d have barbecue beef sandwiches and apple pie and drink root beer until we were sick. Then after the sun would go down we’d all go to the arena for the rodeo. Maybe in a few years we’ll be able to go back for the summer and do that. Does that sound like fun?”

Alessio nodded halfheartedly. His feet moved slowly in the water, barely turning a wake. After a moment he looked up at his mother. “Mom, what’s a rodeo?”

CHAPTER 6

“There are places our spirits feel at ease, no matter how austere, just as there are places we cannot call home, no matter how opulent. I have made a home in a country villa named Rendola.”

—Ross Story’s diary

The next morning Ross led a Catholic choir group from Boston through the Uffizi. The group had just come up from Rome the night before and was still excited from their trip to the Vatican and their audience with the pope.

After the tour, Ross reported to Francesca, then walked back across the Ponte Vecchio to his hotel. He had already checked out of his room, and his backpack, which had only grown slightly in weight since his arrival in Florence, and a small cardboard box waited on the floor next to the front counter.

He sat down on the steps of the hotel to read a copy of the paper while he waited for Luigi. When he arrived, they stowed Ross’s things on the backseat of Luigi’s car and drove off to Rendola.

On their way they stopped at the co-op in Bagno a Ripoli for groceries. Ross purchased six liters of bottled water and four plastic sacks full of food: two large rounds of hard-crusted Tuscan bread, a half kilo of prosciutto cotto, parmesan cheese, coffee, sugar, bread, spaghetti, crackers, penne, a bottle of Tabasco sauce, eggs, salt, Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes cereal, six frozen margherita pizzas and two one-liter cartons of milk. At Luigi’s suggestion he purchased three plug-in mosquito repellents. “You’ll need them in the country,” Luigi warned. “It is not America. They don’t have screens on the windows.”