Carla, sitting at the breakfast table, looked up from the morning paper. “What is that?”

Abruptly, he read the message to her.

“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed, her eyes opened in alarm, her hands flying to her face. “Oh, my God . . . what is the world coming to?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Sam snapped in disgust. “We’ve got to know what happened before we call Tina. As usual Alberto doesn’t say anything—when it happened, how, the funeral. . . .”

“He still calls her Margherita,” Carla got out in a strangled voice, the tears coursing down her cheeks. “She always said he never got anything right about her, not even her name.”

“Always unhappy about something—that’s what she was. But what’s the difference . . . what’s the difference!” Sam looked about him, uncertain, nervous. He felt destroyed.

Difficult in life, now here she was in death, cut from the same cloth. Why? Sam looked out the window of the breakfast room where the sun was pouring in. The garden was filled with the color of peonies and roses, and Joe the gardener was trimming the hedges and clipping grass at the edges of the flowerbeds. It was a tranquil scene. Why couldn’t she have lived a normal life?

“Alberto wants us to tell Tina about her mother’s death,” he said. “And what do we know? I’ll have to call Rome before I can talk to Tina.”

“She’ll be buried in Rome, so far from home,” Carla said. Her face seemed to wither from shock and Sam moved about, darting glances at her and swearing softly, shaking his head. “She had to marry an Italian and live in Italy!” he said.

“She was enjoying life these past few years in Rome. . . . She was happier, I could feel it . . . and now . . .” Carla’s face dropped with weariness, the lines pulled downward against their grain, for it was a face given to much smiling and cheerfulness. Her face and shoulders sagged with the burden of being too late to make it up to the daughter she had not understood or approved of, or even, at times, liked. As if speaking to herself, Carla added, “What did she want? What was she looking for? . . . All that moving around. All those homes she set up and then tore down. And moving those girls around so they had no normal life at all . . . What was it all for? To punish us?”

“She had no sense, that’s what it was!” Sam retorted angrily. “All that education and no practical sense—and it looks like Tina is headed the same way.”