Before I could catch it, my heart slammed straight down to my feet, leaving me with a massive hole in my chest. It was amazing how I could just be going along, doing okay, and then suddenly—wham—I missed her so much even my fingernails hurt.
I looked down at my cone, my eyes stinging. “Thanks, Howard.”
“No problem.”
Howard ordered his own cone, and then we made our way out onto the street and I took a deep breath. Hearing Howard talk about my mom had kind of thrown me, but it was summertime in Florence and I was eating bacio gelato. She wouldn’t have wanted me to be sad.
Howard looked down at me thoughtfully. “I’d like to show you something at Mercato Nuovo. Have you ever heard of the porcellino fountain?”
“No. But did my mom by chance swim in it?”
He laughed. “No. That was a different one. Did she tell you about the German tourist?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that hard in my life. I’ll take you there sometime. But I won’t let you swim.”
We made our way down the street. Mercato Nuovo was more like a collection of outdoor tourist shops—lots of booths set up with souvenir stuff, like T-shirts printed with funny sayings: I AM ITALIAN, THEREFORE I CANNOT KEEP CALM.
I’M NOT YELLING, I’M ITALIAN.
And my personal favorite:
YOU BET YOUR MEATBALLS I’M ITALIAN.
I wanted to stop and see if I could find something ridiculous to send to Addie, but Howard bypassed the market and led me to where a ring of people stood gathered around a statue of a bronze boar with water running out of its mouth. It had a long snout and tusks and its nose was a shiny gold color, like it had been worn down.
“?‘Porcellino’ means ‘boar’?” I asked.
“Yes. This is the Fontana del Porcellino. It’s actually just a copy of the original, but it’s been around since the seventeenth century. Legend is that if you rub its nose you’ll be guaranteed to come back to Florence. Want to try?”
“Sure.”
I waited until a mom and her little boy cleared out of the way, then stepped forward and used my non-gelato hand to give the boar’s nose a good rub. And then I just stood there. The boar was looking down at me with his beady eyes and creepy little molars and I knew without asking that my mom had stood right here and gotten gross fountain water splashed all over her legs and hoped with all her heart that she’d stayed in Florence forever. And then look what had happened. She’d never even come back to visit, and she never would again.
I turned around and looked at Howard. He was watching me with this kind of sad/happy look in his eyes, like he’d just had the exact same line of thoughts and now he suddenly couldn’t taste his gelato all that well anymore either.
Should I just ask him?
No. I wanted to hear it from her.
Conditions at the Duomo had not improved. In fact, the line had gotten even longer, and little kids were breaking down left and right. Also, Florence had decided we could all handle a little more heat, and makeup and sunscreen and all hope of ever cooling off was pretty much dripping off of people’s faces.
“Maybe we should have just stayed hoooooome,” the little boy behind us wailed.
“Fa CALDO,” the woman in front of us said.
Caldo. I’d totally recognized an Italian word.
Howard met my eye. We’d both been pretty quiet since the porcellino, but it was more of a sad quiet than an awkward quiet. “I promise it’s worth it. Ten more minutes, tops.”
I nodded and went back to trying to ignore all the sad feelings sloshing around my stomach. Why couldn’t Howard and my mom just have had a happy ending? She’d totally deserved it. And honestly, it seemed like he did too.
Finally we were to the front of the line. The Duomo’s stones had some kind of miraculous ability to generate cold air, and when we stepped inside it took effort not to lie down on the stone floor and weep from happiness. But then I caught a glimpse of the stone staircase everyone was filing up and suddenly I wanted to weep for a whole different reason. My mom had described walking up lots of stairs, but she’d left out the tiny detail that the staircase was narrow. Like gopher-tunnel narrow.
I shifted nervously.
“You okay?” Howard asked.
No. I nodded.
The line fed slowly into the staircase, but when I got to the base of it my feet stopped moving. Like stopped. They just straight-up refused to climb.
Howard turned around and looked at me. He kind of had to hunch over to even fit in the staircase. “You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”
I shook my head. I’d just never faced the possibility of being squeezed through a stone tube with a bunch of sweaty tourists.
The people behind me were starting to bottleneck and a man muttered something under his breath. My mom had said the view was amazing. I forced one foot onto the stairs. Wasn’t a staircase this narrow a fire hazard? What if there was an earthquake? And, lady snorting nasal spray behind me, could you please give me some room?