The Last Promise Read Free Page B

years in Italy it was sometimes hard for her to believe that such a place as Vernal still existed—a pinprick on a map in a different world. By comparison the Florence countryside made Vernal look as drab as a lunar landscape. But, be it ever so humble, it was still home. And better a warm cottage than a cold castello .
    Eliana’s friends in Vernal still spoke of her fairytale life—the hometown girl who made good, swept off her feet by an Italian lover and taken to a beautiful foreign land, where the language was spoken like poetry and the food was their daily sacrament. A land where immortals like Michelangelo, Brunelleschi and Botticelli had gilded the lily of a country God Himself had already painted. She understood their fantasies, clichés and all, as the fantasies had also once been hers.
    Back in Vernal they didn’t know how things had changed: how her “lover” was usually away from home six days out of seven; the lonely times she called her husband on the road only to have the phone answered by some strange woman, followed by a covered mouthpiece and muffled talking. They didn’t know about the days and nights of solitude spent caring for her son, Alessio. She was the lucky one, they still said of her, the one that got out.
     
    She cut back a line of cadmium red from the canvas with a palette knife. The painting that she worked on this morning was from a photograph she had taken outside rural Siena, a landscape of a stone farmstead, the hills behind it stitched with grape trellises like a great, rolling quilt, fading off into the distance as if already feathered with a brush.
    During her first three years in Italy, Eliana and Alessio flew back to Utah to spend Christmas with her mother. But Alessio’s worsening condition had made it too difficult to make the twenty-six-hour plane journey there and back. The last time they had tried to make the trip, flying from Da Vinci Airport in Rome, the airplane had been delayed by traffic and waited on the airstrip for forty minutes. The fumes of the other jets affected the cabin’s air and a half hour after takeoff Alessio suffered a severe asthma attack.
    Eliana, with the assistance of the flight attendants, had administered his inhalers, followed by oxygen, but he continued to struggle for breath. A doctor was found on board, and she rummaged through the jet’s first aid kit, found a vial of epinephrine which she shot directly into Alessio’s arm. It was only marginally effective, only enough to buy time, and the jet was forced to dump fuel and return to Rome, where an ambulance met them on the airstrip.
    As traumatic as the experience had been, more frightening was the realization that had the attack come just an hour later, Alessio likely would have died before they could make it back to ground. She hadn’t flown with him since.
    Neither could she leave Alessio at home alone with her husband. She wouldn’t dare, even if Maurizio had been willing to watch him—which he wasn’t. Her husband had no idea how to take care of his own son’s basic needs, let alone his medical ones. It wasn’t something men in Italy did, he told her. E’ un lavoro da donne. It is woman’s work.
    Maurizio hadn’t always been that way. While they were courting in America, he helped out, doing dishes, vacuuming and even proving himself the better cook of the two of them. But within their first month back in Italy all that changed. None of his friends’ wives expected their husbands’ help in “domestic” matters, especially with children, and “neither should she,” he said. More than that, she should learn to serve him as his friends’ wives served their husbands.
    She only blamed herself for not seeing it coming. Maurizio’s mother, Antonella, had slaved over him his entire life, from ironing his underwear to laying out his clothes every morning, up to the day he was married. She clearly felt that Eliana wasn’t doing her part as the dutiful wife and would demonstrate