Keeping the Feast Read Online Free Page A

malignant bob and weave of a dumdum.
    Whatever it was, we still have a fabric footprint of how and where the bullet slipped in. Romanian hospital workers somehow managed to save most of John’s clothes despite the bloody bedlam of an ill-equipped hospital emergency room inundated with casualties when the revolution erupted in Timişoara a few days earlier. The staff wrapped John in his parka before our emergency flight to Munich, and he actually wore it a couple of times the following winter, but only till we managed to replace it. The holes were too noticeable, too disquieting, and we finally threw that parka out. We stashed his sports jacket and khakis out of sight in an old wooden cupboard. Later, I cut them up, saving a few square inches around the holes where the bullet slipped in. Then I stuffed them into a drawer along with everything else I had saved from the shooting, enough to fill a four-inch-thick binder.
    If I pull the swatches out of the file, I can see two raggedy holes in the herringbone tweed where the bullet entered the bunched-up sports jacket. Far clearer is the single hole in the khakis, perfectly centered on the seam where waistband meets trousers, directly above the right rear pocket. I used to look at these bits of cloth occasionally, as if they could tell me what had happened and why. But no matter how many times I looked, the holes refused to speak.
    Years later, I still have difficulty even connecting them to a shooting. Shootings, I still like to think, happen to drug dealers or innocent passersby in New York, to foreign tourists visiting Miami. They happen to people who clean guns or keep them under their beds. They happen to soldiers, to policemen, to mafiosi, to people who have enemies. They don’t happen to my husband, my family, to me. I suspect my response of utter disbelief is standard for anyone who hasn’t been blindsided by some sort of shock: the sudden diagnosis of a rampaging cancer, the overnight loss of a family’s life savings. Shocks like these hammer home the notion that a history of good luck is no amulet for the future.

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    Eating Out
    I n some ways, I think a move to Italy was destined to be as much in my future as a move from Italy had been in my family’s past. As a child, I moved only once, from the Fairfield side of Ash Creek to the Bridgeport side. We went from a two-bedroom flat we rented to a three-bedroom house we owned; from a lumbering two-family house overlooking a reedy marsh full of red-winged blackbirds to a two-story, single-family colonial, whose western windows looked out over the broad expanse of a saltwater tidal basin full of gulls. I was nine, my brother, Danny, two, and my mother always said that we spent that entire first day clattering up and down the straight wooden staircase that led to our new, separate bedrooms.
    My parents never dreamed of moving again, and my brother still lives an hour away from the old house, but it seems the delight that took hold of me that first moving day left me hungry to move on. Family history played a role, too. My family had started out in Italy; at some elemental level I needed to go back, to see what they had left and why, to see what my life might have been like had my grandparents or their families not packed their trunks and gone to l’America.
    My first move on my own, to college just west of Boston, was the bliss of freedom. The move to a cramped apartment in Hart-ford, Connecticut, nearly four years later, to marry, was all joy. The move to a quirky flat in the top story of a historic house in Plainville, Connecticut, was magic, especially when I landed my first reporting job at a nearby newspaper. The move to a Dallas suburb three years later—during an endless New England cold spell that left me shivering in our thin-walled, insulation-free apartment—was a revelation: one could actually avoid winter, forever, with something as simple as a move.
    My next move, alone, to an old neighborhood of