“I love you, Massimo. You see—I’m not afraid to say it. I love you. And you?”

“Ti voglio tanto tanto bene.”

“It’s not the same.”

It’s more.

“You’ve said that before. . . .” It was something she had always noted. The gravity of words between them was different—as if the intentions were different. Love/like, for instance. Or lovers/friends. She loved him, he liked being with her. He said it was more than love because there was their companionship, their work in common, their being friends, their dried thistles, their gathering wood together from the piles of pruned branches along the river like squirrels making provisions for the long winter before them.

She accepted it. She told him, “I am not for you what you are for me. But it’s true in a relationship: One of the two always puts more into it than the other.”

“Which of us is putting in more?”

“Why me, of course,” she laughed.

“We’re in this together,” he said. “Just as with our work. Equally.”

“We’ve only made three hundred dollars together so far on the stories of yours I’ve translated. About two hundred thousand lire, at the current rate of exchange. Not enough to live on.”

“Enough for a month if we were careful.”

“But we’re not—we don’t eat bread or pasta or rice or any of the other cheap things. And we drive two cars.”

“We could sell one.”

“But then we’d start to fight over who gets the only car.”

“Well, at least the house is free. Casa nostra,” he said.

“What there is of it—two chairs, a table, a daybed, two forks, two plates, two glasses, a bottle of gin, carrots, stalks of thistle, a wood stove, and my darkroom stuff.”

“You forgot all that wood I lugged up here.”

She took his hands in hers and studied them. “I love your hands, Massimo. I noticed them immediately the night we met.”

“They know every bit of you; they’ve explored every part of you. I’d know your body among any others even if I turned blind.”

“And I know you.” As, in years of marriage, she had never known her husband.

Thanksgiving Day night they made a fire, and roasted chestnuts and sausages in the stove. They threw some of the pinecones gathered at Fregene onto the flames, inhaling the fragrance of them as they sat on the rug before the fire; she slashed the chestnuts and wrapped them in foil to put in the embers, while he skillfully wound the sausages in a circular form on her knitting needle. Then they lay together under the blanket on the couch, watching the shadows on the wall and looking up at the branches of dried thistle and burrs that she had stuck among the rafters.