course.”
“Nonno’s conditions weren’t surprising. What really shocked me was my inheritance. I couldn’t—and still can’t—grasp the amount of money he left me. I remember thinking then that he had apparently known a whole lot more about trading than just dabbling in the stuffed-toy market.”
Shelley nodded. She did not feel like volunteering information about her own inheritance or about her life with Max. She did not trust herself to stay as calm as Paolo if she did.
“I tried to comply with his wishes as best I could,” Paolo said, “not because I wanted the money, but because I wanted to make him proud. After graduating, I decided to remain in the States. I found a job at a publishing company in New York and read Alessandra a story every night. She and I lived happily enough together, and I put her eggs to use in my attempts at re-creating Nonno’s baked eggs and cheese.
“I didn’t have much luck in my cooking though,” he continued. “It became an obsessive hobby of mine to hunt down the perfect baked eggs and cheese recipe. That’s how I discovered the Backpacking Gourmet. I literally fell off my chair when I saw the picture of Nonno posted on the website. Since I knew that my last name was definitely not ‘Christ,’ I convinced myself that it was insane to think that my grandfather had somehow been resurrected from the dead. I did my best to just push the whole thing out of my head.”
“Let me guess,” Shelley said. “It pushed back.”
“Hard. I kept seeing that man’s face as if it were scorched into my eyes. I went through a thousand rational explanations for what I saw but wound up rejecting every single one of them. I finally decided to prove to myselfhow silly I was being. I looked through our old photo albums, hoping to get a good laugh at my own expense. But as I scrutinized each picture, seeing the same, unchanging face, I realized that it was far from funny.”
Shelley looked at him with a question she was not sure she should ask.
“Why didn’t I see it before, right?” Paolo said. “How could I grow up with a man and not notice that he wasn’t getting any older? I asked myself the same thing. But I suppose if you see someone every day, you don’t really notice him getting older or, in this case, staying the same.”
She was surprised that Paolo could read her so well. His similarity to her husband did not end with his looks.
“Nonno was always just Nonno. He was certainly fit for his age, but I didn’t really think much of it,” he said. “The disproportionate number of female customers in his secondhand bookstore didn’t seem to mind, either. They were always quite pleased to learn that he was a widower.”
Shelley’s face fell. She had been so caught up in the morning’s whirlwind that she had not even given a thought to what should have been very obvious from the beginning: Grandmothers were a prerequisite for grandsons. Max had been married to someone other than herself. Her stomach churned.
“My grandmother died long before I was born,” Paolo said. “Nonno didn’t talk about her much.”
Shelley rushed to the sink to throw up.
“Uh … are you okay?” Paolo asked.
Shelley watched the water wash away her last meal as Max’s widow.
Max’s widow
. It sounded like a bad joke. She wondered now if she had ever even truly been his wife. She cupped her hands under the tap and filled them with as much clarity as they would hold. She dove in.
When she emerged, she knew what she had to do. She opened the drawer next to her and groped through it. Inside was the only option she had left. Her fingers found what she was searching for. Her fist tightened around its familiar shape. She drew out her last recourse: her emergency stash of obscenely expensive organic tea. After Madrid, she had made a point of always having a tin of loose jasmine leaves close by. She put the kettle on.
Shelley poured out two cups of steeped calm and offered one to Paolo.