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Uncle Mario raised a half-empty glass and shouted an old Sicilian saying Rosie taught all of us.
Cu picca parrau mai si pintiu.
Those who speak little never have regrets. Ironic since Rosie rarely shut up.
Even though she came to the United States as the baby of four siblings, it was Aunt Rosie who kept the family legends alive. She told and retold the coming-to-America story of our great-grandfather Giovanni, Gio to his friends. The first American of the family, the one who worked himself to the bone in Sicily’s sulfur mines and then bravely came to the new country to labor in a toilet factory in Queens. He slept in the attic of a funeral home in Astoria owned by other Sicilians for more than ten years.
“Slept up there in a coffin like a goddamn vampire, Sara. Now he was a man,” Rosie had told me more than once.
Eventually, Giovanni saved enough money from the factory to bring his children to America and they moved from New York City to the Pocono Mountains, where they’d been told there was a fortune to be made in the coal mines. Someone promised him Scranton was exactly like Sicily, but with snow and coal instead of sun and sulfur. That someone had clearly lied, or perhaps they hadn’t been to either Scranton or Sicily. Then the story turned tragic. Giovanni’s wife, Serafina, never made the trip. The kids apparently traveled across the ocean first while Serafina stayed behind to sell the family land, but she was killed by the flu before she could join them. In the memories of the family she left behind Serafina grew more pious and devoted with each year that passed. She essentially became the Madonna. Saintly, pure, a loving mother and a martyr who had selflessly raised the children in Sicily while Giovanni built a future for them in America. Once they made it to Scranton, Gio and his sons toiled in the coal mines and then saved enough to open a small auto body shop that flourished until my uncle Mario lost it in a high-stakes poker game in the early nineties.
My father named me after his grandmother Serafina, a name that sounds like an angel or old movie star. But for all of my life no one has ever called me anything but Sara, and my mom, whose parents were a mix of Polish, Irish, and German, distinctly not Italian American, insisted on spelling my nickname in the more American way, probably to get back at my dad for his various marital shortcomings.
The drinks disappeared the second I dropped them on the table. My dad and his brothers didn’t even take a break from telling their favorite Aunt Rosie stories to down the shots.
Remember the time she dyed the pond behind the school green for Saint Paddy’s Day.
The time she stole a tractor to drive in the Founder’s Day parade.
When she went skinny-dipping with the mayor and got caught by his wife.
I tousled Dad’s hair and kissed him on his bald spot. He smelled like booze and the Ivory soap he had been using as shampoo, conditioner, and body wash for the better part of six decades.
He was properly sloshed. Rosie’s death was hitting him hard. He was the youngest of the trio of brothers when his parents died. He had a heart tattoo on his left biceps, the kind that usually read mom, except his read rosie.
“Don’t stay up too late,” I whispered to Dad before slipping away to finally read Rosie’s letter to me. I’d put it off long enough.
I nodded to the bartender Jimmy and pointed to my uncles, making a little slashing motion across my throat in the hopes Jimmy would cut them off, and then snuck out the back door, searching for the gap in the chain-link fence that would lead me to Rosie’s backyard.
A rustle ran through the bushes behind me and I paused, my skin tingling, feeling eyes on my back, but there was only silence. The sensation remained as I let myself into my aunt’s dark house and banged my hip on her dining room table. Rosie left her epitaph there, the one she’d been writing and rewriting herself for the past twenty years.
The Body of Rosie M.
Lies Right Beneath This Stem
A Tough Old Broad
Those Who Knew Her Were Awed
She Really Was Quite a Gem
My great-aunt loved a fucking limerick. I could see her scratching out the final version on this rickety old table, maybe right after she penned me that letter.
The house murmured as I lit a fire in the old woodburning stove with a single match just like she taught me. The place was haunted for sure. Rosie’s father, Giovanni, died in the bedroom upstairs at age ninety-three. Rosie’s brother Vin too. Rosie was with them now, but I hoped her spirit could escape this house and travel around the world. She’d always wanted to see the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, but after coming to America she’d never left the States. Even after she got each of her nephews out of her house, she kept inheriting their kids for long stints at a time. Someone was always handing off a wayward teenager who needed an Aunt Rosie–style kick in the ass or whose parents needed a break. My sister and I had lived with her for six whole summers and I moved in for my entire freshman year of high school. Plus, her work at the school never really ended. She was the vice principal, then the principal for four decades. The school never had a guidance counselor, so the kids went to Rosie with all their drama. She exuded a vibe that let you know Oh yeah, I see you and I’m here for all your crap. Even after she retired, she substituted just because she loved it. She also loved the slots and blackjack and frankly her gambling often got the best of her. All of that meant there was never any time or extra cash for Rosie’s international adventures until all the nieces and nephews were grown and it was impossible for her to make it to the casino on her own.
That was when she started planning a big trip to Sicily for just the two of us. But then I was busy opening the restaurant and then I had Sophie and then the restaurant started doing really well so how could I leave? I promised over and over again that we would go. By the time she got sick my restaurant was bleeding money, and the trip never happened. Remembering all the times I put her off hit me like a punch in the gut.
I fixed myself a sobering cup of tea in one of the hundred mugs littering my aunt’s kitchen cabinets. Whenever any of us went on a trip she insisted we bring her back a mug. I once asked her what the hell we would do with all of them when she died, half joking, and she’d replied with all seriousness, “You take your favorites and then leave the rest of them on strangers’ stoops as a surprise gift. Who wouldn’t want to wake up to a the poconos is for lovers mug on their porch? Talk about making someone’s day.”
I sipped from the nobody does it like niagara cup that Uncle Mario picked up a few summers ago and opened the letter.
Rosie wrote that she already missed me, that I was the daughter she never thought she wanted, that her only regret was not seeing everything I would one day accomplish. I was blubbering by the time I got to the tough love. She told me I needed to get my shit together. I never should have let my dream die, I could have asked her for help. (With what money, Rosie?) Irritation and love seeped into every sentence she wrote.
She waited until the end for the surprise. Surprises are the best thing in life and there are too few of them, Rosie used to insist.
I’ve got a plan for you, gioia mia. You trusted me your whole life. I need you to trust me now.
I’m sending you to Sicily. You and I should have made the trip there together a long time ago. Now don’t go feeling sorry and blaming yourself. I’m not mad at you. Life got in the way... but we’re not gonna let death hold us back.
