Mamma Garibaldi’s watery blue eyes shimmered as tears began to flow down her sagging cheeks. “I have failed. I have failed as a mother. I don’t know how I can go on living.”

“Mother, you are overreacting.”

“Overreacting. Overreacting! I have done everything that I was biblically supposed to. I go to mass every Sunday. I made you go to mass. I have done my duty by God. Why does he punish me as if I were Job?” She moaned loudly. I looked around the restaurant, which had fallen silent as people began to watch us. “Your father is turning over in his grave. He would never have wanted this.”

“You act like such a fool.” José’s tranquil face grew dark and stormy. “What my father would have wanted was for me to find fulfillment, which I have indeed found.” Mamma Garibaldi opened her mouth to speak, but José lifted a hand, stopping her. “Whether you like it or not, this woman is my wife. I don’t care what you say or think. She is my wife. You will learn to accept her, or you will lose your son.”

Mamma Garibaldi sniffled, bringing her tears to a halt. She stared at her son in wide-eyed disbelief as he added, “I will not continue to indulge your hysterical delusions.”

“Very well,” she whispered, setting her napkin on the table.

The next morning as I placed the children’s breakfast in front of them, Mamma Garibaldi wobbled as she made her way into the kitchen. Forgoing her usual fruit and toast, she chose to only drink coffee. She closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of the thick black liquid. Menotti and Teresita, usually very lively, cast furtive glances at each other, unsure of what was happening and how to proceed. José, no longer caring what his mother thought, had slept in the bed with me during the night but left shortly after the sun rose to work, and to avoid his mother. He came into the dining room with a newspaper under his arm and a box of cookies in his hands. He set the box down in the middle of the table and shoved the paper under my nose. “You were right.”

“Well, it’s kind of you to acknowledge the obvious, husband, but I need more specifics,” I said, taking the paper from him.

“Austria attacks Milan!”

I snatched the paper from him. Austrian forces had gone back into Milan. They had jailed every member of the provincial government and declared martial law.

“The Austrians have undone everything that the rebel forces put together.” He smiled as he pushed a cookie into his mouth.

“You sound all too happy about this,” I said, bringing the pan back into the kitchen while the children, abandoning their breakfast, descended on the box of sweets in the middle of the table.

“I am!” José called to me. I walked back into the dining room, handing him his tea. “This means that all the dusty old tactics that those archaic politicians clung to didn’t work. I can show them that they can’t operate that way any longer, not if we are going to win this. They have to listen to me now,” he said with his mouth full.