The Last Promise Read Free Page A

to desist, for it was an old church, an old priest and an old congregation, and nowhere are tradition and religion so interwoven as in the Italian countryside. She had tried other churches in the area and found them all to be the same, their chapels reeking from centuries of incense even without lighting new.
    She attended church only when her husband was in town, which was rare on weekends, so Eliana mostly worshipped in solitude, pausing before the picture in her studio each morning, crossing herself, then lighting a candle to carry her petitions heavenward. She had many. The Holy Mother was the patron saint of mothers. She would know Eliana’s heart. More than anyone else, the mother of Christ would understand; for she had suffered what Eliana feared most—losing her son.
    Alessio had manifested the first signs of his asthma at the age of two, just thirteen weeks after their coming to Italy. One fall evening as she was putting him to bed, he suddenly began gasping for breath. It would have been a frightening moment for any mother, but Maurizio was out of town on business when it happened, leaving Eliana alone in a foreign country where she didn’t know who to call or where to go in an emergency, even if she could speak the language. It was the most terrifying moment of her life. Not knowing what else to do, she prayed for help. Almost immediately there was a knock at the door. Anna and her husband had decided to stop by for a visit. They rushed Alessio and Eliana to the hospital.
    It was the beginning of a new life. Every year since, Alessio had suffered from attacks severe enough to send them running to the nearest emergency room.
    After she finished her daily rite, Eliana would go to the kitchen to make herself a cup of hot ginger tea, which she brought back to the small round table next to her easel. Then she would turn on her music.
    On the counter behind her easel were a CD player and a wooden case that contained CDs by mostly Italian artists—Pavarotti, Bocelli, Battisti, Zucchero—her collection diversified with a few country-westerns, Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, Clint Black, an album of Gregorian chants and a Barbra Streisand album that now seemed to her a thousand years old.
    This morning she chose Pavarotti, inserted the disk and turned on her stereo. The music started too loudly and she quickly turned it down. Just two doors away from her, Alessio was still asleep. With any luck he would remain so.
    The two of them were alone in the house. Maurizio was away on business. As usual. He had called sometime during the night, woken her, to say he’d been delayed. He’d be home Saturday or Sunday, she didn’t remember. She didn’t care that much anymore. She wondered why he’d bothered to call. He hadn’t thought to ask how Alessio was or why her voice was so hoarse. He didn’t know that she’d been up half the night as their son struggled to breathe.
    After he was breathing regularly and had gone back to sleep, she lay on the couch next to him listening for each breath and quietly crying until sleep silenced her. As distant as she and Maurizio had grown in the last six years, in spite of all his lies and infidelities, she had wanted him then. She wanted him to hold her. For just ten minutes she wanted to be weak.
    She put on her painting smock, then sat down on her leather-covered stool, unscrewed the lid of a tube of white oil paint and squeezed a large circle of it onto her palette. Italian girls dream of marriage. Italian wives dream of love, an elderly Italian woman had once told her. What, then, do American women who marry Italian men dream of? She could speak only for herself. She dreamt of home. Home in a small town no one in Italy had even heard of. Vernal, Utah. Back where they still called her Ellen and where her mother still fretted over her raspberry bushes all year long, then spent days putting up bottles of jam in wide-mouthed Kerr bottles just to give them away to her neighbors.
    After six