“I didn’t mean to.” It wasn’t raining, so we plunked down on a bench. “Please, I don’t want to be shut up at home. Let’s just sit here a little while.”

“Yes, please. Let’s.”

“We’re always shut up at home!” she complained.

“You never take me anywhere!” I complained.

It was great, the three of us sitting there under gold-rimmed clouds. In her book bag, she had unleavened pizza for Gionata and a peanut butter and blueberry jelly sandwich she’d made for me, because I love crappy American food. Not only had she remembered to buy peanut butter, she’d even cut off the crusts. I was so tickled, I grabbed my nephew, pulled aside his scarf—the baby scarf my mother knitted me—and covered his neck in kisses, but he was having none of it and slid off my lap to beg for bits of brittle pizza scrocchiarella: Daniela held a piece out on her palm, like feeding a pigeon, and he’d lick it off while we both laughed.

A woman and her girls were coming down the path by the piazza; she was a foreigner, Romanian or Moldavian, I recognized her, the doorman’s wife, and she stopped in front of us and pointed to Gionata: “Look,” she told her daughters. “He’s eating unleavened bread.” Then they walked off, into the light.

Daniela turned to me: “Why did you lock me away in this neighborhood, my love? Get me away from here, I’m dying.”

“My mistake. Let’s move.”

“And soon.”

A dinner one night, me, Daniela, and my parents, my father worn out, aching from physical therapy, but delighted at its benefits, and full of endorphins. He was talking about the Greek crisis while Daniela and I listened and drank our white wine in sync, sipping in code.

“There’s only one solution to the pension problem: people have to die sooner. And you watch—they’ve finally realized this. They’re cutting health care. Where our friends live in Sabina, they shut down the hospital. Someone who’s sick will think twice about going fifty kilometers to see a doctor at a different hospital, going all that way. You don’t go today, you don’t go tomorrow. Eventually, you die.”

My mother cut him off, arguing only because she couldn’t take his cynicism.

We heard Gionata start to cry. Daniela, going to check on him, brushed my neck with her hand on the way by, and I felt a trembling all down my back, like a lightning strike in a field.

My parents told me about Sunday at the beach with Gionata. “He’ll enjoy his private rubber raft from Rome,” my father said, referring to the little gift I’d bought that afternoon at my neighborhood grocery store.