“What are you doing?” Dario called, from the terrace.
“Smelling the lemon.”
A pause. “Alright.”
“You should try it.”
Another pause. Then footsteps on the path. He appeared beside me, looked at the lemon tree for a moment, and then pressed his nose against a lemon. “You’re right.”
“I know.”
He looked at me sideways.
“I’m keeping track,” I said. “The times I’m right. For the record.”
“You have a lot of records going.”
“I’m a data-driven person.”
He almost smiled. We stood there in the lemon grove in the early evening light until the bugs found us, which took longer than I expected.
On the second morning, I woke up before him and walked to the village alone. Something I haven’t been able to do in years—just walk, without Opal’s hand in mine, without the constant background accounting of a single parent who is always tracking a small person’s location and well-being.
Turns out, I’ve missed this.
I walked through the village market and bought figs and a bottle of something local, and I sat on a bench in the square for forty minutes watching the pigeons and the old men playing cards and the light moving on the old stone buildings.
It felt like the first time I’d exhaled since I was twenty.
When I came back, Dario was on the terrace with coffee and a book, and he looked up when he heard me on the path. “Good walk?”
“Perfect.”
“You were gone a while.”
“I sat in the square. For no reason. Just to sit there.”
He looked at me over his book with an expression I’ve learned means he’s recording something. “How was that?”
“I didn’t know how necessary it was until I was doing it.”
He nodded once, like that made complete sense, and handed me his coffee. I sat down beside him, and we looked at the lemon grove in the morning light and didn’t say anything else, which was also necessary, and also exactly right.
Tonight he cooked something elaborate—a visit to the village market this morning, two hours in the kitchen this afternoon while I sat on the terrace pretending to study my business coursework but mostly watching him through the window.
The food is extraordinary. Pasta and grilled fish, the lemons in three different applications, and a wine he selected with no hurry. We eat slowly on the terrace in the way you can eat when there’s nowhere else to be and the evening is long and warm and the village lights are coming on in the valley below.
“This is so good,” I say, about the pasta.
“I know.”
“You’re not supposed to agree that readily when someone compliments your cooking. It’s not modest.”
“You do it.”
He’s got me there. “Yeah, okay, smart guy.”
“And the pasta is good. That’s just accurate.”
