Two days before my brother’s wedding flight to Italy, my father stood quietly beside the radiator with the suitcase he had packed 66 days earlier.
He had been preparing for this trip with the care of someone who had waited his entire life for it.
Inside the suitcase was a charcoal suit he had bought in 1978, when he first dreamed of returning to Italy.
He never made that first trip.
His mother had needed him at home. Later, she passed away, and the years kept moving. The suit remained in a garment bag, untouched for 46 years.
Now my father took it from the suitcase, carried it into the bedroom and hung it back inside the closet.
He had just read the message from my brother’s fiancée.
“Your brother agrees. Yours are too old for Europe anyway.”
Tatum had canceled both of my parents’ plane tickets.
Then she used the refund to upgrade her own mother and father to first class.
I am Delia Petraino. I own a small two-chair salon in an upstate town, and twice a week I do hair for families preparing for weddings, funerals and other important events.
That work taught me something useful: no matter what is happening inside you, your hands still have to keep moving.
I needed that lesson that day.
Because when Dad closed the closet door, I knew something much bigger than two airline tickets had just been taken from him.
My father had left our ancestral mountain village in 1957 when he was only seven years old.
He remembered leaving with a cardboard case held shut by a belt.
For decades, he carried memories of Italy with him.
The stone lanes.
The hillside houses.
His father’s voice.
The village where the Petraino family had lived for generations.
Returning there had always been his one unfinished dream.
My mother, Angela, had known that.
So in 1998, she quietly started saving for the trip.
Fifty-five dollars every month.
For 25 years.
She never made a big announcement about it. She simply put the money away.
On her dresser sat a small blue passbook with one word written across it:
Italia.
