Salvatore and I were married for thirty-two years.  I still live in the house he bought for us; I still sleep in our bed.  All around me are the signs of our life together.  My bedroom window looks out over the garden he planted.  In the middle of the city, he coaxed tomatoes, peppers, zucchini--even grapes for his wine--out of the ground.  On the weekends, he used to drive up to his cousin's farm in Waterbury and bring back manure.  In the winter, he wrapped the peach tree and the fig tree with rags and black rubber hoses against the cold, his massive, coarse hands gentling those trees as if they were his fragile-skinned babies.  My neighbor, Dominic Grazza, does that for me now.  My boys have no time for the garden.

            In the front of the house, Salvatore planted roses.  The roses I take care of myself.  They are giant, cream-colored, fragrant.  In the afternoons, I like to sit out on the couch on the porch with my coffee, protected from the din and eyes of the neighborhood by that curtain of flowers.

           I am surrounded by the things Salvatore gave me, or did for me.  But, God forgive me, as I lie alone now in my bed, it is Paolo I remember.

            Paolo left me nothing.  Nothing, that is, that my family, especially my sisters, thought had any value.   No house.  No diamonds.  Not even a photograph.

           But after he was gone, and I could catch my breath from the pain, I knew that I still had something.  In the middle of the night, I sat alone and held them in my hands, reading the words over and over until I heard his voice in my head. I had Paolo’s letters.