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The steps were just as I remembered them, old, gray, cold. The smell of wood burning in the fireplaces mingled with the mountain air. I took calculated steps to nonna’s house. We left our luggage in the car, so there was nothing holding us back. Yet something heavy was holding me down. It was much more difficult to climb these steps than it was seven years ago.

As we walked through the door, I grasped my father’s shirttail like a child. But I was too old to hide, and my dad couldn’t protect me.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed all the faces looking at me. They turned away quickly and whispered. I stumbled through the kitchen to the living room. I thought, “I can’t do this. Don’t make me do this.” But I let go of the shirttail and was left there alone in front of my grandfather’s casket.

He looked much smaller. He was wearing his good shoes, his cane nestled to him. I walked to him. Again, this inexplicable weight made the few steps painful. I bent over to kiss his bald head trying to pass the warmth of my lips to the coldness of his yellow skin. Instead, his chill traveled through me like a current.

His hands rested awkwardly on his bloated belly. They were much too clean to be the hands of a farmer but clean enough to be the hands of a bedridden man no longer able to press the soil between his fingers.

“I told you I was coming back, but you didn’t want to wait,” my father cried in his ear. We missed him by one day.

The priest began: “Il nome de padre, figlio, e spirito santo. Amen.” He motioned for them to close the casket. “Not yet,” I said. But with the bang of the cover, he was gone.

My grandparents’ bedroom is upstairs. It has always been cold there because the heat from the fireplace doesn’t reach. They have an electric blanket but not too long ago they put hot coals in a copper pan and ran it through the sheets.

The bed is tall with rosary beads hanging from the mahogany posts. He died in that bed, and nonna hadn’t laid eyes on it since she dressed him for his wake. During the week of my stay, I hadn’t seen her go upstairs, not even to use the bathroom.

Her body hadn’t changed much since the last time I saw her. She had earned a new wrinkle or two and extra gray hair in her braided bun. Still petite and frail, she sat by the fireplace. Hunched over, she stared into the flames trying to keep warm. She stopped keeping things in order, gossiping about others in town, feeding her chickens. She rarely looked up from the flame. Nonna was exhausted.

We found out he was sick in August. We all knew he was dying, but we said “sick.” I don’t think nonna believed he was dying. If she did, she hid it admirably. She cared for my grandfather for six months. He’ll be well soon, she would say. Whatever truth she lived by, one thing was constant: she desperately attempted to heal his deteriorating body. She was his wife, by his side for 55 years. Even though family surrounded her, she sat by the fire stirring the embers alone.

Next to this massive fireplace, she appeared so small that I thought she might be engulfed at any moment. Safety is in this place that had kept her warm for nearly 75 years. By the light of the flame, she fed her children, mended clothes, recited her rosary, and brewed espresso.

My grandparents kept this fire burning through harsh winters when the fireplace was the center of their world. Relighting the fire is painstaking. No one likes to do it; we struggle to remember to stir the coals, yet everyone relishes its warmth. In this home, warmth is essential. No thermostat is to be found, no heaters, just matches and some wood. And when it’s cold. It. Is. Cold. The kind of cold that makes bones ache. The fire exists not for the beauty; it is a matter of survival.

She was too sad to go upstairs. She had never slept in that bed alone. Instead, she rested on the ratty sofa in the living room. Her days consisted mostly of keeping the embers lit.

I’m the eldest of three grandchildren. Sabrina and Ivana have lived with my grandparents all their lives. They eat, rest, laugh, and cry with them. They are an indispensable part of the family. I’m this far off grandchild who is “successful,” “beautiful,” and the “smartest person on the other side of the Atlantic.” I’m not real.

I took a kitchen chair and dragged it to the fireplace next to nonna. I rubbed my hands to keep warm as she peeled an orange. She motioned for me to come closer and looked at me with worn eyes. Her gaze turned to the flames.

“He always asked about you,” she said.

“What?” I asked a bit startled.

“Whenever I was on the phone with your father, he asked, ‘Come sta la citola (the baby)?’ I would tell him, ‘She’s 22 now, you still call her la citola?’ He would wave his hand and dismiss me.”

“Really?” I smiled.

“Yes. He always asked about you.” She gave me a wedge of orange.

Maybe I am real.

Visitors came at all times to pay their respects. With arms loaded with flour, sugar, coffee, fruit, they comfortably entered the kitchen and claimed their seats by the fireplace. After day one, I was no longer a guest. As the mourners took their positions, my aunt, cousins, and I scattered to do our duties.

Zia ran to the stove to make a coffee while I uncovered trays of cookies hiding under aluminum foil. Ivana made sure there were enough chairs for everyone while Sabrina took a count of those who wanted espresso. In a rehearsed dance, no one bumped into each other, and no step was forgotten. These duties had never been delegated. In fact, they came quite naturally.

Nonetheless, I continued to feel like a fill in. The real granddaughter fell ill, and I was her understudy making sure the play continued as planned. In a few days the real Natalie would feel better and take her place in the kitchen.

I sat in the corner near the door leaving the warmer places closer to the fire to the guests. Some who didn’t know I spoke Italian would openly talk about me: “Has she finished school?” “How old is she now?” “Oh, she looks much younger than that.” “How long is she staying?” “That’s it?” “Does she have a boyfriend?” “When is she getting married?” I sat, seemingly ignorant, and nodded my head with a strained grin on my face until nonna ended the charade by saying, “Ask her yourself, she understands.”

After the guests left, Zia carried groceries to the cantina. She put as much as she could in a basket, carefully balanced it on her head and effortlessly walked up the steps to put away the gifts until they were needed. But one day the townspeople were extra generous, and she couldn’t carry it all in one trip.

She bellowed at me with her scratchy voice, “Lei, come on!!” “Lei” an affectionate term meaning honey when one refers to young girls. Until then, the only time I heard her use it was when she addressed her daughters. I sat quietly for a second and pondered how strange, yet comforting, it felt to hear her call me that. As I smiled, the duties I inherited with the new name didn’t occur to me until I heard again,

“LEI, ANDIAMO!!!”

My dad and I drove down the mountain to the cemetery. The awkward jolts of a standard rent-a-car and the many curves didn’t make me as carsick as they usually did. My father quietly held my gaze. He drove pensively. His face held the expression of every word as though he were speaking aloud. I nudged his elbow a bit to make sure he was still with me. He startled.

“You ok?”

His mouth said yes while the tears in his eyes said something else. A few moments later his mouth began to communicate what his eyes were trying to tell me.

“You see how the world is? How people are taken away before they’re done. Just like that, he’s not here anymore.”

In between sentences his eyes tried hard not to let the tears go. He waved his hands above the steering wheel trying to explain.

“You do what you have to do. Be with the people that you love because before you know it, it’ll be too late.”

“I know, Dad.”

“No, I don’t think you know. When you feel like you have to do something .. when something tells you, you have to do something, you do it.. don’t think.. don’t wait around for people to tell you what to do. You do what you need to. Capito?”

“Yes.”

“Because you see.. I needed to be here.. I knew I should have come.. but I didn’t… now it’s too late.. What the hell am I supposed to say to him now? Am I supposed to talk to a grave? He’s gone… It’s too late.”

“I know.”

My father had never spoken to me like that. We were close but my family rarely talked about serious things. We are more a family of action. We do. We don’t say. That’s why I didn’t know how to respond. Instead, I walked by his side to the fresh grave.

I looked at the bareness of it. It was too soon to have the battery-operated light installed or his name carved in. Nonna had chosen the picture that was to occupy the center of the marble slate. Around me the black and white faces stared at me as I struggled to remember who they were. To the right were my great grandparents. Among the other stones “Spadorcia” was carved in a multitude of places. I traced my last name with my finger attempting to get a feel of my ancestors. It only felt cold.

I was relieved that my grandfather’s picture wasn’t ready. It was easier to mourn without the dead looking right at me. As I stared at the empty slate, I wondered what I would have said to him if I made it in time. I thought about my father’s words. Like a true Spadorcia, I would have said nothing. I would have kissed him on his bald head and that would have been enough.

I left Prezza at 5 a.m. I kissed Zia, Sabrina, and Ivana goodbye and turned to nonna. She held a clear bag containing homemade almond cookies. “I remembered you liked these,” she whispered without looking up at my face. “Thank you,” I whispered.

I bent to kiss her, and she abruptly returned the gesture and pushed me away. As though I was preventing her from doing something urgent, she waved her hand for me to hurry along. I smiled at her and walked out the door.

Before I exited, I looked over my shoulder one last time at the shiny stove, the worn staircase, the warm fireplace, and I realized I knew where everything was in that house. The spoons, the phone book, the shoe box with pictures in it. For the first time, I felt I wasn’t the foreigner. I belonged. I ran to the car and gave nonna one last wave with my bag of cookies.

Back in Medford, I enjoyed the sweetness of home. I turned the heat up, sat in front of my TV with a mug of “American” coffee. My mom sat across from me and asked to tell her everything. I suddenly began to cry.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I’m homesick.” I still am.