The Last Promise
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
AFTERWORD
Visit Richard Paul Evans’s Web site for a tour of The Last Promise online.
Teaser chapter
“Beguiling. . . . Those who enjoyed The Christmas Box are in for another treat.”
—Publishers Weekly
From the New York Times bestselling author and “one of the world’s most beloved storytellers”* comes a rich and all-too-human tale about the tragedy and triumph of love. . . .
In America, she was known simply as Ellen—a young woman who could only dream about love and art and passion . . . until a man came into her life, an irresistible Italian who turned her head and wanted to take her away. So she followed her heart . . . and followed him to Italy.
Now, living in a small rustic village, nestled in the Chianti countryside of Tuscany, she is Eliana—a mother and wife whose dream of becoming a painter has come true, but whose husband has left her disillusioned about love . . . until she meets a fellow American, a man who shares her passion for art and beauty and opens her eyes to life’s possibilities.
But Eliana is not a girl from Utah anymore. And this is not a dream about love, art, and passion. This is real. And their meeting is going to change her life forever. . . .
“A lush world full of Italian history and mythology. . . .
By weaving details of the wine harvest, local festival,
and vestal virgin tragedies into this story, Evans
achieves romance without overcooking it. . . . And
Eliana is truly likable . . . a sensual, sympathetic beauty
with a dry sense of humor.”
—Bookreporter.com
“Evans spins a bittersweet tale of the fantastic joy and great sorrow life can throw your way.”
—*Idaho Press-Tribune
A Selection of The Doubleday Book Club®, The Book-of-the-Month Club®, and The Literary Guild®
ALSO BY RICHARD PAUL EVANS
The Christmas Box
Timepiece
The Letter
The Locket
The Looking Glass
The Carousel
The Christmas Box Miracle
For Children
The Christmas Candle
The Dance
The Spyglass
The Tower
The Light of Christmas
SIGNET
Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Dutton edition.
First Signet Printing, October 2003
Copyright © Richard Paul Evans, 2002
Excerpt from A Perfect Day copyright © Richard Paul Evans, 2003 All rights reserved
Tip-in photo: Capela Della, Val D’Orcia, Bob Krist
Italian proverbs from Treasury of Italian Love: Poems, Quotations & Proverbs in Italian and English and Dictionary of 1000 Italian Proverbs, published by Hippocrene Books.
eISBN : 978-1-101-14396-4
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PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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To Carole Baron, con affetto
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Tante grazie to the following: Laurie Chittenden, for your insight, enthusiasm and patience. It’s nice being with you again. The whole Dutton crew: Carole, Lisa, Brian, Kim and Stephanie. Thank you for welcoming me into your family. My dear friend Laurie Liss (and Kate and Timothy), for everything, as usual. Artist Steve Smulka and Dolores Libera, for sharing your hearts. Author James McBride and Stephanie McBride, for your help in relocating. (Miracle at St. Anna was wonderful, James.) My staff, Celeste, Krista, Lisa, Karen, Fran, Dad, Paula, Tawna and Heather. Thank you for keeping the home fires burning.
The Last Promise would not have been possible without the assistance of my new Italy friends: Vahe and Andrea Keushguerian of Rendola—may your vineyards flourish! Enrico Marelli, with admiration. Miriam DiMarco—thank you for being so good to me. Andrea Venturini (www.accademiarealty.com). Luigi Tomassi, who first brought me to the villa. Andrea, Anna and Patrizio Santurro. My dear friend Maurizio Ventura (who in no way resembles the Maurizio in this book), Alberto and Maria Teresa Sottili. Laura Mongiat and the entire AISF crew. The Ferrini famly. Diane and Ugo Punteri. Steve and Mia Harper of the American Consulate in Florence. John Pitonzo, buona fortuna with your book. Megan and Mark at Villa Bagnolo.
Of course my amore, Keri, and my children: Jenna, Allyson, Abigail, McKenna and Michael. And my Italy daughter, Cammy. Thank you for embracing a new life as well as a new country. You are my reason.
And “Eliana”—the woman by the pool.
PROLOGUE
“Who has been in Italy can forget all other regions. Who has been in heaven does not desire the earth.”
—Gogol
Italians think of God as a fellow countryman, and walking a gravel incline alongside a Chianti vineyard, I wonder if they might not be right. The early sun in Tuscany paints the landscape with a different palette than the rest of the world, gilding the hills and vineyard trellises in a rose-gold hue and the otherwise drab, finger-leafed olive trees in silver so that they glitter in the dawn wind like a school of herring.
It’s early in the morning, before the first bells of the San Donato Tower, quiet, except for the occasional, distant pop of rifles echoing through the Valdarno Valley. The men are out hunting cinghiale—the wild boar. In my wanderings through the countryside I’ve encountered neither of them, hunter nor beast. But I hear the shots fired every morning, popping like corks off wine bottles, sometimes in my dreams.
I woke at four this morning, even before the hunters, and lay in bed for nearly an hour. Then I dressed and went out to walk. My wife is used to me crawling out of bed at all hours of night like an obstetrician. It’s an appropriate metaphor, I think. Stories, like babies, don’t often wait for decent hours to be born. I’ve been thinking all night about a story that has come to me.
Some stories are crafted as if by blueprint, built line by line and brick by brick. There are stories born of angst, wrung painfully from an author’s mind onto pages that, in the end, are more of bandage than paper. Then there are those stories that seek the writer, drifting through time and space like thistle seed, until they find fertile ground on which to land and take root. This is one such story. It found me during my second week in Italy.
I met her at the poolside of an Italian country club called Ugolino, about nine kilometers southwest of Florence. She looked thirtyish, slender, attractive. She was wearing a peach-colored bikini, luminous against her bronze skin, with a sheer, pastel wraparound skirt. Her hair was nearly black with a few strands of honey-colored highlights, though where it fell back over her shoulders the sun revealed a natural brown-gold tint. What I noticed first was her eyes. They were exotic and teardrop shaped.
She was reclined in a lounge chair reading a paperback romanzo and doing her best to ignore the stream of Italian men who paraded in front of her to ogle and drop lines that could be understood even without knowing the language.
It was a sweltering hot day. Solleone, the Florentines call it—lion sun. The pool area was mobbed with children playing noisily in the water while the adults stretched out on the white plastic lounge chairs that surrounded the tiled perimeter of the pool.
I’m told that it takes three confirmed miracles to merit sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. I believe that finding a parking space in downtown Florence or a lounge chair by a pool in summer should both qualify. Heaven smiled on me that day. As I entered the pool area, a man was gathering his things, leaving the only vacancy. It happened to be a chaise next to her.
After draping my towel across the length of the chair and covering my body with 30+ sunscreen, I took my laptop from my bag and turned it on. The image on the screen was too vague from the sun’s glare, so I closed it back up and went for my standby: a mechanical pencil and a wire-bound notepad I had purchased the day before at a supermarket in Florence. On the notepad’s cover was a photograph of a lemon wearing round-lensed granny glasses. The picture was titled John Lemon. I wondered if the Italians understood the pun.
I lifted my pencil to the page, not because I had words, but because a blank page beckoned. Perhaps I inherited this trait from my father. A new board begs a nail, he once told me. My father is a carpenter.
But there was too much noise and motion around me to write. After ten minutes I put the notebook away, took out a book and began to read. Suddenly a thin, bald Italian man stopped in front of me. He had skin as brown as leather and was wearing what looked like the bottom half of a woman’s bikini.
“Non si possono portare le scarpe sul bordo della piscina.”
I looked up at him. “Scusa,” I said in my two-week-old Italian. “No capito.”
He pointed at my feet. In truth I had no idea what he wanted. I wore only white-soled tennis shoes. The worst infraction I could conceive being guilty of was a fashion faux pas. I looked at him blankly.
Suddenly the woman next to me said in perfect English, “He’s telling you that shoes are not allowed in the pool area.”
I glanced over at the woman, whom I had assumed was Italian, then back at the man. “Mi dispiace,” I said, as I removed my shoes.
“Grazie, signorina,” he said to the woman and walked away.
I sat back in my chair. “Thank you.”
“It’s nothing.” After a moment she asked, “Where in the States are you from?”
I wondered that I was so obvious an American. “Salt Lake City.”
A smile broke across her face. “Really? I’m from Vernal.”
“Vernal, Utah?”
“Sì. Il mondo e piccolo.” It’s a small world.
Vernal is a small town in the eastern desert of Utah: a stop on the way to someplace else. Even in Utah I had never met anyone from Vernal.
“I thought you were Italian.”
“So do the Italians. I lived here for six years. After that much time you start looking like a local.” She laid her book in her lap and leaned over, extending her hand. “I’m Eliana.”
I likewise introduced myself. Just then a man, shirtless, maybe in his late fifties with a belly hanging over his swimsuit and a cigar clamped between his front teeth, stopped in front of her chair. “Buon giorno, zuccherino.”
She flicked her hand at him as if to brush him away. “Vai, vai, vai.”
He walked away smiling. Eliana turned back, shaking her head, though more amused than annoyed. “He called me his little sugar. I hope my husband gets here soon. The Italian men regard a lone woman the same way they would a bill on the sidewalk.”
I smiled at her metaphor. It was true.
She took a drink of bottled water then settled back in her chair. She asked, “How did you find this place? You’re a long way from the usual tourist haunts.”
“My real estate agent told me about it. I’m not really a tourist. I moved here with my family two weeks ago. We have a cottage, about eight kilometers from here in San Donato in Collina.”
“It’s beautiful in San Donato. Do you have any children?”
“Five.”
“Five. That’s a lot of children. Especially for Italy.”
“Women always congratulate us. They say complimenti . The men just ask ‘perché?’ ” Why?
Her mouth twisted with a smile of understanding. “Yes, they would. How are you all adapting to your new life?”
“Good. Mostly. It’s not all gardenias and Bella Tuscany.”
“Every sweetness has its bitter. The romance usually ends for Americans after they get pickpocketed or run over by a scooter.”
“We’ve had our moments. When we landed in Venice our Italian guide never showed up. We took one of those unmarked taxis and ended up paying seventy dollars for what should have been a three-minute cab ride. Then, after we got to Florence, the car dealership wouldn’t give us the car we paid for. They said we needed some number from a permesso di something. They gave me an address in downtown Florence where I could get it.”
She nodded. “It’s the address of the questura—the police headquarters. You need a permesso di soggiorno. But it’s not that easy to get.”
“What is it?”
“Basically it’s permission to live in Florence.”
“I thought that’s what our visa was for.”
“No, it’s something else. With Italian bureaucracy it’s always something else.”
“How long does it take to get a permesso di . . . ?”
“Sog-gior-no,” she said slowly, breaking the word into syllables for my benefit. “It takes a while. Unless you know someone high up in government, or the priest of one of the bureaucrats, it could take as long as a year. How long do you plan to stay in Italy?”
I groaned. “About a year. The car dealership won’t release our car until we have one. We’re still renting a car.”
“Don’t worry. There’s always a back door. Go to the questura and apply, then take the receipt from your application to the dealership. If you ask nicely, they’ll likely give you the car anyway.”