PART 1 — THE BIRTHDAY DINNER

My mother’s seventy-eighth birthday wish was simple.

No party.

No expensive gift.

No room full of relatives asking whether her knees were getting worse.

She wanted dinner.

One quiet dinner at an Italian bistro in downtown Minneapolis that several women from her church had been talking about for months.

“They make the gnocchi by hand.”

Mom told me.

“Sister Beatrice says it tastes like something you would eat in somebody’s kitchen back home.”

Home meant Italy.

Not Minnesota.

Not the apartment where she had lived for twenty-seven years.

Not the house where she raised my brothers and me.

When my mother said:

“home,”

she meant a hill town in northern Italy she had left at nineteen.

A stone fountain.

Narrow streets.