“I don’t know. I need to check if Dad has plans—but sure, sure—why not—we could—what were you and Barbara thinking of?”

I’d made her nervous, so I said we’d talk about it later.

I tried again one night after my third gin and tonic, standing on the sidewalk of a Milanese street, trams and cobblestones, talking to her on my headset, glass in hand, a few meters from the crowd drinking outside, at twilight, on an exceptionally cold evening. I really felt like hearing her voice.

My mother was the one who brought it up: “About your birthday … Dad’s really tired, let’s do something normal, simple. Come for breakfast. Barbara, too, maybe, if you two come to Rome the Saturday before, or stay afterward. Dad’s tired.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“No, it’s nothing. You know. It’s just complicated right now.”

And as she spoke, I reconsidered and told her she was right. I remembered a recent conversation I’d had with my father:

“I know how I caught this chill. But I’m always sick lately.”

“It’s stress.”

“Maybe I have a tumor in my esophagus. I have this acid reflux, I keep coughing.”

“You should go see the doctor who cured mine. He gave me a connective-tissue massage.”

“Maybe. When things aren’t so busy.”

I agreed with my mother, I had the same impression lately about Dad, and we hung up, having decided on a breakfast the morning of my birthday.

On the following day, during cocktail hour at a different bar, I started thinking about it again, and left a group of colleagues to give her a call, again using my headset. My mother told me: “Marcellino, why are you dwelling on this?” She never calls me that. “It’s your birthday—nobody else’s. Figure out how you want to celebrate your fortieth birthday and stop trying to engineer something else.”

I wish it were truly possible to have a major scene at my house, a time when you truly hit the mother lode—excuse the pun—but it just doesn’t happen. I heard myself saying: “For a gift, I’d like to have a party with you and Irene.” But I didn’t say this. “Okay. But these last months in Milan, things have changed for me, and I’m happy about it.”

“That’s wonderful, the best thing a mother could hear. But really, you mustn’t concern yourself with how others are getting along. We’re all adults and have made our own choices.”

And then I went ahead and said—cryptically, respecting her wish to be vague—“Sometimes a person makes a choice, other times he doesn’t—it’s just turned out that way.” I purposely used “he,” to be extra vague.

“I sometimes think,” she said, twisting my meaning, “that certain choices are made because they’re in style.”

The way she said “style” brought me back to myself, standing on a sidewalk in Milan, among people that only a few months before I didn’t know. My mother’s voice came from Rome—my city.