Welder's Italian Idyll

My name is Nick. I'm twenty-eight years old, and I weld for a living, mostly pipe and structural work out at the fabrication yard north of town. My husband Preston is twenty-seven, and he designs websites from a laptop at our kitchen table, which means he gets to wear pajamas at eleven in the morning and I do not.

Every year around our anniversary we do the same thing. We cook burgers in the backyard, the same way we did on our first date, when Preston came over to my duplex after our evening welding class at the community college and I panicked and grilled him a hamburger even though it was July and ninety-five degrees. He was twenty-two then and I was twenty-three, and he stood there in a ball cap, sweating, watching me scrape the grill with a wire brush, and he said, "You know, most guys take me to a movie." And I said, "I don't know anything about movies. I know about fire."

Five years later we were still doing it. Same burgers, same folding chairs, same little tiki torches from the hardware store that never stay lit. And this year, standing there in July flipping patties, I felt something I'd never felt on an anniversary before. It felt like homework. Good homework, but still homework.

Preston ate his burger and watched me poke at the coals.

"You're doing the face," he said.

"What face."

"The face where you're mad at charcoal because you're actually mad at yourself." He wiped ketchup off his thumb. "Nick, it's five years. It's okay if a burger isn't enough anymore. I'm not mad about the burger."

"I'm not mad about the burger," I said, which was a lie, because I was a little mad about the burger. "I just figured by year five I'd have come up with something better than ground beef in the backyard."

"Well." He got this grin, the one he gets when he's been sitting on something for weeks. "Funny you should mention coming up with something better."

He went inside and came back with a plain white envelope. I wiped my hands on my jeans before I took it, out of habit, because grease and paper don't mix.

Two plane tickets. Catania, Sicily. Departing in three weeks.

I sat down on the folding chair a little too fast and it wobbled under me.

"You did not."

"I did. I've been saving since January. I told you the freelance logo jobs were going well." He sat on the arm of my chair. "We fly out in three weeks, so we'll be in Sicily on our actual anniversary. There's a farmhouse place I found, an agriturismo, near a town called Ragusa. Olive groves, cliffs, the whole postcard. We have a dinner reservation at the farmhouse for our actual anniversary night. Under the stars, supposedly."

"Preston, my Italian is terrible."

"It's nonexistent."

"It's terrible and nonexistent. The last Italian I said out loud was 'grazie' to a guy at a sandwich shop and he gave me a look."

"So we'll be two idiots in Italy together. That's kind of romantic, don't you think?" He leaned his head against mine. "You've been wanting something bigger. I heard you. So. Bigger."

I looked at the tickets again, like they might change if I stared hard enough. Sicily. I'd never been farther than Jamaica on a work trip, and that was for a pipeline job where I saw mostly the inside of a hotel.

"Okay," I said. "Yeah. Okay. God. Yes."

"That's four answers," he said. "I'll take the last one."

So three weeks later we were on a plane, and then a shuttle bus, and then standing at a rental counter in Catania while a very patient man explained our car to us in English better than we could explain anything to him in Italian. Preston had made a spreadsheet, because Preston makes spreadsheets for fun. The farmhouse was two and a half hours inland, near Ragusa, and the directions were a printout of an email from the owner, half in Italian and half in English, with one photograph of a gravel road that could have been any gravel road in the world.

The car was a little gray Fiat that seemed to hold views about being borrowed, and I drove because Preston's relationship with a stick shift is a fight he always loses.

The first hour was highways and signs we couldn't read fast enough. The second hour was smaller roads. Olive trees everywhere, rows of them going up hills that looked too steep to farm, and limestone cliffs just sitting out in the fields like somebody dropped them there. Preston had the window down and his arm out of it, doing the flat-hand wave thing, and I let him, because it was his trip.

"Turn here," he said. "I think. The email says after the second church, take the unpaved."

"That was one church."

"Was that a church? It had a bell thing."

"That was a shed with a bell on it, maybe."

"We'll count the shed," he decided. "Sheds count in Sicily."

So we turned, and it was gravel, and it was exactly like the photograph in the email except going on for a lot longer. The Fiat bumped and complained. There were stone walls on both sides, old ones, stacked without any mortar, and every so often a gap where a dirt track went off toward some trees.

Then the engine made a noise.

Not a warning noise. A clunk. A real, solid, inside-the-engine clunk, like somebody had dropped a wrench into it. The car shuddered, the steering got heavy, and I coasted us onto the widest patch of gravel I could find and we stopped.

I turned the key. It cranked and cranked and did nothing.

"No," Preston said, like the car could be argued with.

I turned the key again anyway. Nothing.

We got out. It was late afternoon and the light had gone gold, and we were on a gravel road between stone walls with nothing visible in any direction except olive trees and one hill, and on top of the hill, way up there, a farmhouse with a red roof. Which I figured, hoped, was our agriturismo.

I popped the hood because I'm the guy who pops the hood, even in Sicily, even on a rental. I stood there and looked at an engine that made no sense to me at all, all plastic covers and hoses I couldn't name, and I put my hands on my hips.

"Well?" Preston said.

"Well, I can weld a quarter-inch seam underwater in a wet suit, and I have no idea what's wrong with this car."

"Great. Handy man. Very useful."

"Don't start."

He laughed, and then he did the thing he does, which is get out his phone and wave it around at the sky like that helps. One bar. Then no bars. Then one bar again, standing on his toes on a rock.

"Okay, so, options," he said. "One, we walk up there." He pointed at the hill. "Two, we wait for a car, and we've seen one car since the shed-that-counts."

"How far do you think it is?"

"Twenty minutes. Thirty with luggage."

It was thirty-five with luggage, uphill, on gravel, in the kind of heat that had cooked all day and was now letting go of it. By the time we got to the top of the hill my shirt was stuck to my back and Preston had stopped talking, which for Preston means something serious is happening.

The farmhouse was real, at least. Stone and whitewash, a courtyard, a fat dog asleep by a low gate who lifted his head and decided we weren't worth standing up for. And an older man came out of the doorway wiping his hands on his apron, and he looked at us, two sweaty Americans dragging suitcases up his hill, and he said something long in Italian.

Preston and I looked at each other.

"Grazie," I said.

The man laughed and pointed at our car, far below and tiny now, then at a phone on the wall inside, then held up one finger. Behind him, through the doorway, I could see a long table set with candles, and a woman laying out plates, and the whole place smelling like somebody's kitchen at the good hour of the day.

"Nick," Preston said quietly. "I think this might be the place."

We stood there in the courtyard, dripping, and the man kept talking at us in Italian like volume would fix the language problem. His name turned out to be Signor Cassara, though I only learned that later. Right then he was just an old guy with an apron and a lot of opinions we couldn't understand.

"Parliamo inglese?" Preston tried. "Um. English? Americano?"

"Ah!" Cassara lit up like we'd asked the right question, then immediately said something else entirely in Italian.

I pulled out my phone and opened the translate app, praying to the phone gods about the one bar of signal I'd seen Preston find outside. It took forever, the little spinner going around, and finally it coughed up some words and I showed him the screen. We had a reservation. Car broken. Sorry.

Cassara read it, nodded hard, and then pointed at us, then at the house, then made a gesture like he was pulling a tablecloth through the air.

"Si, si," he said, and took my suitcase handle right out of my hand.

He dragged us inside past that long table with the candles. The woman laying out plates gave us a look. Preston tried again. "Dinner? Cena? We wanted to book, um." I typed it in and showed the screen. Dinner for two. Anniversary.