Member-only story
We Save Each Other
“I went to Rome for the holiday…
When Renzo arrived, I no longer cared that he was hours late, or why he hadn’t picked me up. By then my fever was 104, and I asked him to take me to a hospital.
But instead, he carried me to the car and took me to his mother, who didn’t like me. I was an Americana Puttana to her, but he delivered the woman he loved to the other woman he loved, and she immediately took over, kissing my forehead to determine how bad the fever was.
I don’t remember much about the next two days, except there was water and rosaries and prayer and soaked underpants and t shirts and sheets being changed, and old women caring for me, lifting my head, saying drink. His mother called in her friends and they cared for me in shifts, wiping me down with cold towels, talking to me in a language I barely understood…
When I finally returned to the world from my small cot with clean sheets, I took a shower, washed and brushed my hair, put on a red dress and had dinner with his whole family around a small kitchen table with gold stars in the formica.
I told funny stories in broken English and bad Italian and we all laughed, though I’m certain it was the love and the relief we were all alive together, not the story…
