The day following her meeting with Sister Carmela she bought a broom and had Serafino cut off part of the long handle so that she’d have a rolling pin to make pasta and chinolelli, her stuffed pastries for feast days. And she sent Jake and Ben off to school with the bunch of field flowers they had picked in the country for their teacher.

Serafino found a job as a laborer in the railroad yards, and every day Umbertina got up early to make dough for the crusty white pizza he liked so much. She prepared enough for his lunch, too, and sprinkled it with oil, oregano, and a touch of ground red pepper. Or else she varied the pizza for Serafino’s lunch by making it with onions, or with potatoes and rosemary, or with pieces of scamozza cheese, or olives and anchovies—but never with tomato sauce as the Neapolitans did, for that disguised the good taste of fresh dough and turned it soggy and soft. Sometimes instead of pizza she made bread and gave Serafino panini of meat, or egg and escarole, or peppers.

Serafino was envied for his freshly made pizza or panino among his fellow workers; their women let them pick up bread from Annicharico and cheese or salami somewhere else along the way to work. Soon they were asking Serafino to bring them the same lunch as he had—they’d pay. Before long the news of Umbertina’s baking reached others, too, and through Serafino, the laborers who stopped in at Scalise’s bar for beer on their lunch break started giving orders for Umbertina.

How often, as she got up in the cold dark of a winter’s day to start the fire in the wood-burning stove or went out to shop, did she thank God for her health and energy and think with contempt of the laziness of the other wives, who preferred to sleep rather than fix their men’s food.

Umbertina kept the men’s orders in her mind; she had great powers of concentration and a memory that took the place of reading and writing. She charged everyone the same flat rate of 75¢ per week for their lunches to simplify pricing. To get the mill workers’ lunches ready for Serafino to take with him, she’d get up at five in the morning to start the baking and get to the market. She never got an order wrong.

For Umbertina it was an article of faith to eat well, and now that she could afford it she always had in her kitchen the most virgin of olive oils, the most aged and mellow of cheeses, the best salami and freshly baked bread, crusty and not doughy inside the way the bakers left it to increase its weight.

This was a northern climate, she said. And they needed to eat more, including meat, to keep up their strength.