LITMIR.BIZ

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      When I showed up at my parents’ house later that morning, he presented them to me proudly. “Dad, these are women’s shoes.”

      “What do you mean? No, they’re not.”

      I snapped a photo of them and texted it to Jenny. “Those are espadrilles,” she confirmed.

      “Dad, they’re freaking espadrilles.”

      “So?”

      “So what did you pack for pants . . . capris?”

      Dad was never one to adhere to the norms of fashion. He had a freewheeling sense of style that boasted leather pants, earrings, stacks of necklaces, and flowy dress shirts that he unbuttoned like a pirate. When I was little, I idolized his rockstar ways and begged my mother to let me get my ear pierced just like him. When my father chaperoned one of my grammar school field trips, all of my friends and perhaps some of my teachers thought he was my older, much cooler brother. “Nope, that’s my Dad,” I proudly told them.

      As I got older, however, Dad’s clothing choices—or lack of clothing, in some cases—could be truly cringeworthy. Once while I was playing lacrosse in high school, I found my teammates pointing and chuckling at something in the stands. “See that guy?” one of them asked me, gesturing to the grassy hill set behind the stands. I looked up to find my father basking in the sun in nothing but a tiny pair of running shorts that he had hiked up his crotch like a Speedo. “Wow,” I said, taken aback. “Who is that basket case?”

      Despite the many times he strutted into parent-teacher conferences like he’d just stepped off the stage at an Aerosmith concert, I admired my father’s unwavering self-confidence, especially as I entered adulthood. Everything about him defied conventionality. He was here to make an unmistakable mark, and he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought. If you called his outfit into question, he only doubled down, popping off another button and adding another necklace. So when Dad stepped off the plane onto Italian soil, he did so wearing a pair of black flats that he insisted were “ninja shoes.”

      “WE SHOULD GRAB SOME cash before we get out of here,” Dad said. His stomach pain had mercifully subsided just before landing, and color had returned to his face.

      “I have my credit card,” I said. “So we’re good.”

      “Yeah, I know, but we should really have some cash on us, you know, just in case.” He pulled out a thick wad of bills. “Here, let’s change this.”

      My brother, Mark, and I could always count on my father for cash. He’d slip us a twenty spot whenever we saw him. “Here, grab yourself a six-pack,” he’d kid. He never used a credit card. Not once. Nor had he ever taken money out of an ATM or personally written a check to pay a bill. In fact, beyond paying his taxes every year, there was hardly any paper trail to prove my father’s existence. Which was exactly how he liked it, under the radar. The last time he’d cashed a check at the bank was before he married my mother. Since then, she handled all of the family’s finances—buying and paying off two homes, putting two kids through private high school and college, and setting aside a modest retirement nest egg. Money was never discussed. Dad happily turned over all his paychecks to her and lived off the cash tips he received from his clients after each haircut.

      The arrangement suited him perfectly, especially since he never wanted for anything. Not a thing. Apart from his bicycle collection, he was completely disinterested in material possessions. His cars were always two-toned jalopies, the most recent of which he’d purchased at a junkyard from one of Papa’s old friends. “Fifteen hundred bucks,” he announced after sputtering into the driveway. “Can you believe it?”

      Yes, we could.

      He loved getting a deal and took infinite pride in his ability to stretch a buck. “Ninety-nine cents—can you believe it?” he told my mom after pulling out a bunch of bruised bananas from his backpack. “They were practically giving them away. I mean, hello?”

      He had an old Yankee sensibility of making things last, dutifully sewing zippers back on to jackets, patches on to pants, and buttons back on to shirts. He scorned owning anything new. We bought him expensive cycling kits for years, but he never wore them. Instead, he kept them in the plastic like a prized collection of comic books while he sewed the zipper off an old pair of jeans to fix a worn-out cycling jersey. Throwing anything away physically pained him. “I hate waste,” he said whenever he found an abandoned can of soda with a couple sips left in it. “Hate it.” Then he knocked back the rest of the can himself, no matter how flat it was.

      Frugality was going to be de rigueur over the next two weeks. For Dad, that was all part of the challenge. Like sneaking microwave popcorn into the movie theater, he relished the thrill of saving a few bucks. As much as I hated to admit it, I was right there with him. Though I regularly poked fun at my father’s stinginess, I couldn’t deny that I was becoming more and more like him. Over the years I had developed my own bizarre penny-pinching habits while traveling. Sleeping in airports or on trains to save on the cost of a hotel room. Taking several layovers instead of flying direct for a cheaper plane ticket. Subsisting entirely on all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets. That type of behavior had become far less feasible with Jenny in my life, but for the next two weeks it was just Dad and me. The arithmetic for our trip would be how much we saved, not how much we spent.

      I SLID THE WAD of cash through the currency exchange window. The woman behind the glass counted out a stack of euros and handed it back.

      “It’s like Monopoly money,” Dad said. “You hold on to it.”

      We walked out into the glaring afternoon sun and motioned for a taxi. I scribbled the address to our hotel on the back of my plane ticket and showed it to the driver. Despite repeated claims that I was going to study up on the native tongue, I hadn’t picked up more than a few words in Italian. “We want to go here,” I said, tapping my chest and then the piece of paper.

      “Yeah, no problem,” the cabbie responded in perfect English. “Twenty euros.” He pulled around the airport’s roundabout and zipped us through the outskirts of Florence. The scenes panned across Dad’s wraparound sunglasses. Walls of graffiti. Vespas buzzing by with their drivers carrying oversized loads. Children kicking a soccer ball around a cement court. This was my father’s first glimpse of Italy. Everything was new, and he stared out the window with guarded curiosity.

      The cab entered the grips of historic Florence, where stone buildings passed inches from the window as the driver deftly darted around pedestrians. We jostled over cobblestone streets and down tight alleys until we popped out onto a pedestrian-only street. “That big door,” the driver said. “That’s you.”

      “Alright, Pops, let’s do it.” We scrambled out of the taxi. I handed the driver twenty-five euros and waved off the change. I was never sure what the tipping policy was in Europe. We shouldered our bags to the hostel, then I pressed the bell, prompting the giant wooden door to click open and reveal a tranquil courtyard with a small palm tree in the center.

      “This is dynamite,” Dad said, as the wooden doors closed behind us.

      I’d found our lodgings online—a steal at only thirty-five euros, including breakfast. Circling around the palm tree, we found a staircase and climbed up four flights of marble steps that had been worn down over generations. “I read online that this place was built in the sixteenth century,” I told Dad. “The architect was some big-time Renaissance master.” He nodded approvingly.

      The innkeeper met us at the top of the staircase. He had thinning salt-and-pepper hair and a graying mustache and goatee that framed his smile. “Ecco, per favore,” he said, directing us to follow him through the big apartment to his check-in desk. “Passaporti, per favore.”

      I handed them over.

      “Your brother?” he nodded to Dad.

      “No, no. I’m the father,” Dad said, chuckling. “He’s my son.”

      “Thanks for adding that detail, Pops.”

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