LITMIR.BIZ

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only thirty-five euros a night—it had a single twin bed. I glanced at my father, who didn’t have any issue about sharing the bed, especially not for thirty-five euros. For that price, he’d happily spoon with me on a bath mat.

      “Excellent, thank you,” Dad said to the innkeeper, before slinging his mini backpack on the mattress and pulling open the thick drapes. He could sleep anywhere. He often conked out on the hardwood floor of the kitchen near the heating vents. Growing up, I thought nothing of stumbling upon him sleeping under the dining room table. There was a stretch of time when my father insisted on sleeping in the uninsulated vestibule of our family’s house—during the dead of winter.

      “It’s like camping,” he told my mother while rolling out his sleeping bag.

      “What if the neighbors see?” she pleaded.

      “Forget the neighbors.” Mark and I gawked at him through the window as he slithered into a thin, old sleeping bag. Plumes of his frozen breath fogged the glass.

      “Don’t you ever tell anyone about this,” my mother said. “Your father is nuts.”

      A FEW HOURS LATER, Dad and I were lying shoulder to shoulder in bed. There wasn’t even enough space for a pillow barrier between us. Thankfully, of all my father’s quirks, sleeping in the buff wasn’t one of them.

      Settling in, I pulled out my iPhone. “What’s that?” Dad asked, peeking at the screen.

      “Our route.”

      “You got the route on that thing?” he asked. “That’s wild.” Dad’s burner flip phone was a couple of years away from having its own exhibit at the Smithsonian. He watched me zoom in and out on the digital map from the corner of his eye, trying to hide his fascination.

      We were starting from Florence, which if Italy is seen as a long boot, was high on the shin. The first day would take us to Siena, which was due south. From there, we’d pedal southeast into the heart of Tuscany for three days until we reached Rome, which was only 144 miles as the crow flies from Florence. Of course, we weren’t flying—I planned to link together a complex string of back roads, thoroughfares, and highways that would effectively double that distance. Beyond Rome, I had no idea how we were going to find the village of San Donato, our ultimate destination.

      “How’s it looking?” he asked.

      “We’ll be biking forty-nine miles on the first day.”

      “Oh, that’s a piece of cake,” he said.

      “Uphill. Forty-nine miles . . . uphill,” I said. “There’s 6,183 feet of climbing on the first day.”

      Rolling onto his side, he groaned sarcastically. A gentle breeze wafted in through the hostel’s heavy curtains. Voices echoed up from the courtyard below. Dad’s breathing got heavy and rhythmic. I stared up into the darkness. What’s Papa doing right now? I wondered. Hell, he’s probably curled up in bed, worrying about us.

      “Can’t believe we’re here right now,” Dad said, breaking the silence. “We always talked about it, talked about the village and all, but I never thought I’d actually be going.”

      “I know,” I said, “it’s pretty surreal. It’s crazy that Papa never went on his own, back to the village.”

      “I know, I never got that,” Dad said. “Maybe it had something to do with his father. Who knows.”

      “What was your grandfather like?” I asked.

      Dad rolled back around and thought about it for a second. “He was really good to me,” he said. “He always came to all my football games growing up. No matter what, I’d look to the stands, and there he’d be.”

      I’d heard that anecdote from him before, but I wanted to know what my great-grandfather was actually like as a man. He was so one dimensional in my mind. What was his personality?

      “Well, he didn’t have much of a sense of humor,” my father explained.

      This statement demanded follow-up. “What do you mean by that?”

      “He was a serious guy. He went to church every single morning, then after mass he’d go up to the barroom in Brighton Center and have a shot and a beer and then he’d go to work.” Dad described his grandfather as a functioning alcoholic, a deeply religious man whose greatest regret was he didn’t enter the priesthood. “Pretty sure that haunted him,” he said. “He’d come home drunk and basically preach about the Catholic Church.”

      “Really?” I asked.

      “Yeah, he went to mass every single morning, then he’d go to work.” Dad’s grandfather worked just over the Charles River in Cambridge at a Ford dealership where he was a mechanic. I wondered why he was so religious. “I don’t know,” Dad said. He thought it might have something to do with him growing up in San Donato. “I mean, there’s like four churches there. But, yeah, he and his brother were really religious.”

      When he was a little boy, my father basically lived with his grandparents in the Yard, the makeshift compound they erected when they first immigrated to the United States. “We all lived together there in Brighton, back then,” he said. “Papa’s parents, his uncle and his family, all the nephews.” He described his grandfather as an unhappy man with a temper. “I mean, he never hit my grandmother or anything like that, but there would be these shouting matches where the police would show up.”

      “Did this happen often?”

      “It didn’t happen all the time,” Dad said. “Maybe I’m blowing it out of proportion. But even if it happened just once, it had such an impact on me that it seemed like it happened more—but it may have not.” He sighed. “He and Papa didn’t have a good relationship at all.”

      “I know, why was that?” I asked. I had tried to talk about this directly with Papa, but he wouldn’t really go into it with me. Dad explained that his grandfather was a jealous man.

      “Jealous of Papa?”

      “Yeah, well . . . ” My father paused for what felt like a long time, weighing something in his mind. “There’s . . . a . . . a number of things—I got this from, I actually don’t remember who told me this, but it wasn’t from him . . . Papa believed that his father thought he wasn’t legitimate.”

      “What?” I asked, trying to piece together that statement, although the intent could not be more clear: my great-grandfather thought Papa wasn’t his son. After a few moments, I asked my father if that was possible.

      “No, it’s baloney!” he said. “They looked so much alike.” Despite that, for whatever reason, my great-grandfather never treated Papa like one of his own kids. Growing up, my dad told me, Papa didn’t have his own bedroom. He had to sleep on the couch in the parlor, while his siblings had rooms. “They loved their father. Idolized him and thought he was like a god, but Papa basically had to fend for himself.”

      According to Dad, Papa couldn’t wait to move his family out of the Yard. “When he finally bought a house, apparently my grandfather walked up to him on the front porch and said something like, ‘I guess you think you’re some kind of big shot, now, huh?’” Dad wasn’t sure how much they saw of each other after that. “Papa never really forgave him. But nothing he can do about it now.”

      My father turned back onto his side, facing away from me. His breathing got heavy again. I squeezed my eyes shut, knowing that if I didn’t fall asleep soon, I’d be up against the full wrath of his snoring. I tried to settle the pigeons of thought pecking at my mind about my grandfather’s toxic relationship with his father. How heavy that must have been to carry all his life. How did he handle that void of love? How did it impact who he became as a father? Why could they never reconcile? And why had my family never talked about it? That troubled me most. Why hadn’t my family addressed this trauma from Papa’s past?

      My father started snoring. Ok, sleep. Just sleep, my mind pleaded. There will be plenty of

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