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“I see no ring. You are not married?”
“No.”
“No children?”
I shook my head. “No. I’m more of a business woman than a family woman.”
“Ah, but family is everything.”
“I’m beginning to understand that. I have a sister with a son. They moved to be with me.”
Kind eyes offered me more solace with kind words. “So, then you have a family.”
I nodded as I thought of my sister in that hospital bed.
“She is very sick.” I was so much better at confessing to strangers.
Donato paused his fingers. “I am sorry for you.”
“Thank you.”
He drew a handful of flour out of a canvas sack and piled it onto the table. He grabbed a bottle of olive oil and plugged the top of it with his finger as he sprinkled it all over the waiting flour.
“So you vacation alone?”
“Yes.”
He pulled out a smaller bag filled with yeast, cupped his hand in careful measure, then tossed it in a bowl before adding some piping hot water.
“What are we making?”
“New friends bake bread.”
Once he had assembled the ingredients, adding everything with a pinch here and there with his hands, he threw the ready dough in my direction.
“Press with this,” he said as he tapped the fat bottom of his hand above his wrist. “And separate into four.” He placed four glass bowls next to me.
He cleared his side of the table with the swipe of a towel as I began to start a different dough.
I let out an incredulous laugh at my circumstance.
“What is so amusing?” Donato asked as he eyed me with a pinch of salt between his fingers.
“If you only knew how strange this is after the last few days of my life. Being here with you, in this kitchen. It’s kind of unbelievable.”
“Did you get on a plane to vacation to Barga?”
“Sort of.”
“And you slept outside my bakery alone?”
“Well . . . yes.”
He tossed the salt into a bowl and began to mix. “Then maybe it is not so unbelievable.”
Donato moved lighting fast as he lit every oven at his disposal and began to fill baking pan after baking pan with hand measured concoctions.
“You do all of this alone. Every day?”
