Clair. They were late; Nonna hadn’t been able to find one of her single pair of good shoes. Massimo, who was not looking for it, was the one who found it, in the basement cantina on the shallow window ledge with a cartoonishly flattened spider adhered to its sole. Paola helped her mother-in-law out of the back seat of the car. She had learned over many years that irritation only fed on itself and that an unnecessarily solicitous act was often helpful to put to rest the hot white sparks that sometimes swarmed inside her head like angry hornets. She held open one of the hall’s heavy, gilded doors to let Nonna enter, and Nonna nodded left and right as she passed over the threshold like a duchess on a carpet acknowledging her subjects. Nicolo heard a burst of distinctively feminine noise released into the street when the doors were pulled apart. Talk like a stream, familiar shouting, the calling out of names, comforting, abundant, anchoring, the sound of happy women celebrating a milestone of one of their own.
