It was the beginning of a new life. Every year since, Alessio had suffered from attacks severe enough to send them running to the nearest emergency room.

After she finished her daily rite, Eliana would go to the kitchen to make herself a cup of hot ginger tea, which she brought back to the small round table next to her easel. Then she would turn on her music.

On the counter behind her easel were a CD player and a wooden case that contained CDs by mostly Italian artists—Pavarotti, Bocelli, Battisti, Zucchero—her collection diversified with a few country-westerns, Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, Clint Black, an album of Gregorian chants and a Barbra Streisand album that now seemed to her a thousand years old.

This morning she chose Pavarotti, inserted the disk and turned on her stereo. The music started too loudly and she quickly turned it down. Just two doors away from her, Alessio was still asleep. With any luck he would remain so.

The two of them were alone in the house. Maurizio was away on business. As usual. He had called sometime during the night, woken her, to say he’d been delayed. He’d be home Saturday or Sunday, she didn’t remember. She didn’t care that much anymore. She wondered why he’d bothered to call. He hadn’t thought to ask how Alessio was or why her voice was so hoarse. He didn’t know that she’d been up half the night as their son struggled to breathe.

After he was breathing regularly and had gone back to sleep, she lay on the couch next to him listening for each breath and quietly crying until sleep silenced her. As distant as she and Maurizio had grown in the last six years, in spite of all his lies and infidelities, she had wanted him then. She wanted him to hold her. For just ten minutes she wanted to be weak.

She put on her painting smock, then sat down on her leather-covered stool, unscrewed the lid of a tube of white oil paint and squeezed a large circle of it onto her palette. Italian girls dream of marriage. Italian wives dream of love, an elderly Italian woman had once told her. What, then, do American women who marry Italian men dream of? She could speak only for herself. She dreamt of home. Home in a small town no one in Italy had even heard of. Vernal, Utah. Back where they still called her Ellen and where her mother still fretted over her raspberry bushes all year long, then spent days putting up bottles of jam in wide-mouthed Kerr bottles just to give them away to her neighbors.

After six years in Italy it was sometimes hard for her to believe that such a place as Vernal still existed—a pinprick on a map in a different world. By comparison the Florence countryside made Vernal look as drab as a lunar landscape. But, be it ever so humble, it was still home. And better a warm cottage than a cold castello.