The Villa and the Carpenter

She sat on the stone steps outside the villa and cried with the keys still in her hand. The taxi had gone. Its dust hung above the lane, thinning among the cypresses, and she watched until there was nothing left to suggest that anyone had brought her here. Her suitcase stood beside her, one wheel caught in a crack. Beyond the terrace, the pool shone through the railings with a blue so extravagant she could hardly look at it.

She had expected to cry inside. There would have been some dignity in that, or at least privacy: a door to close, a bathroom in which to wash her face. Instead, she had taken the keys from the driver, climbed the steps, and reached the house before discovering that she could go no farther. Somewhere on the journey she had begun to imagine her father opening the door.

She knew he was dead. She had read the letter, spoken to the people handling his estate, bought the ticket. Still, she had crossed an ocean to his doorstep, and some childish part of her had expected him to come out. She had no face to give him. In all the weeks since learning his name, she had avoided asking for a photograph.

Her mother had died when she was too young to remember her. By the time she understood that the parents raising her were not the people who had made her, there was nobody who could tell her much about her father. For years she had supplied her own explanations, changing them as she grew older. None had included this house. She had been teaching a lesson when the first message about the inheritance arrived, her phone silenced in a drawer beneath a stack of spelling tests.

The iron key had left a groove in her palm. She loosened her grip and laid the ring on the step between her feet. There were four keys, a small brass disc, and a leather fob worn almost black along its edges. He had carried these. He had reached into a pocket for them with groceries under his arm, or late at night, or impatiently in the rain. She could imagine the movements more easily than the man.

Her adoptive mother had called while she was waiting for her luggage. Take pictures when you get there. I want to see where you are. She had promised she would. Now her camera lay in its padded case inside her bag, and her phone was full of messages she could not answer without making this place sound like a holiday.

The villa was beautiful, which made it harder. She had been prepared for neglect, for a house that would justify the speed with which she meant to empty and sell it. But the pale plaster held the afternoon light, and jasmine had climbed into the ironwork beside the door. Someone had swept the terrace. Through the railings she could see a folded umbrella, two loungers, and a shallow dish weighted with a stone.

He had been comfortable here. She looked at the loungers and imagined him choosing one according to the sun, putting a book down while he swam. All those afternoons. She had spent twenty-five years without knowing where he was, and here he had been, with a pool and a place to leave his drink.

A fly settled on her knee. She brushed it away and wiped her face with the sleeve of her shirt. Inside, there would be drawers to open and clothes to sort. She had made a list on the plane, assigning days to rooms as though she were preparing her classroom for the end of term. Books. Furniture. Documents. Things worth shipping home. Things nobody wanted. She had allowed three days for his bedroom, although she could not have said how she’d arrived at that figure.

Across the lane, a gate scraped over gravel. She looked up too quickly and saw a man carrying two long pieces of timber toward a low building. He wore work trousers and a faded shirt, its sleeves rolled unevenly. He stopped when he noticed her. She turned her face away. There was nowhere discreet to put it.

For several seconds she heard nothing. Then the timber knocked against a wall, and his footsteps came as far as the gate. He did not open it. From where she sat, she could see the white dust along his forearms and the dark curls at the nape of his neck.

“Do you have the key?”

His English caught her by surprise. She looked down at the ring between her feet. “Yes.”

He waited. She wished he would go back to whatever he had been doing. A breeze moved through the jasmine, releasing a sweetness she found almost nauseating, and she bent to retrieve the keys before he could offer to help her find them.

“The door sticks,” he said. “You have to pull it toward you while you turn it.”

“I haven’t tried.”

He glanced at her suitcase, then at the unopened door. She could see him choosing what to say, and dreaded his kindness more than she would have dreaded an impatient instruction.

“I knew your father.”

The tears returned so suddenly that she had to press her lips together. She looked at the brass disc in her hand, furious at herself, at him, at the sun continuing to fall so beautifully across the empty terrace. “Well,” she said. “That makes one of us.”

He lowered his eyes. She had expected an apology, perhaps an assurance that her father had been a good man. Instead he stood at the gate while a vehicle passed behind him, raising dust around his boots. When it had gone, she looked up again.

His eyes were bright blue. For a moment their color distracted her from everything else: clear and vivid beneath dark brows, in a face browned by the sun. His hair was dark brown, thick enough to curl where sweat had dampened it. He was older than she was by enough that she registered it at once, though she couldn’t have placed his age. There were creases beside his eyes and a narrow scar near the corner of his mouth. He looked accustomed to being outdoors, to lifting things, to finishing a day tired.

She became conscious of her own face, blotched and wet, her blonde hair stuck to her cheek. She pulled it away and tucked it behind her ear. He watched the movement, then turned his attention to the door.

“Would you like me to open it?”

“No. I can do it.”

She stood too quickly. After the flights and the drive and sitting so long on the stone, her legs felt unfamiliar. At home she could run five miles before breakfast; here, she needed the railing to get to her feet. He stepped toward the gate but stopped when she let go. She was grateful he hadn’t rushed up to catch her, and unreasonably annoyed that he hadn’t.

The key turned halfway and refused to go farther. She pulled the door toward her, as he’d instructed, and felt the lock release. It opened into darkness and a smell of furniture polish, stale air, and something faintly medicinal. She stood on the threshold, waiting for her eyes to adjust.

Behind her, he said, “My workshop is across the lane. If you need anything.”

She nodded without turning. When she looked back, he had picked up the timber again. She watched the muscles in his forearms shift as he changed his grip, then went inside and closed the door. Its weight surprised her. The sound traveled through the house and left her listening.

There was a coat on a hook in the entrance hall. A man’s coat, dark wool, inappropriate to the heat outside. Beneath it stood a pair of leather shoes with newspaper folded inside them. She walked past without touching either and found a sitting room with the shutters closed. She opened one window, then another. Light exposed a faded rug and a glass cabinet full of small objects she would have to wrap separately. On a table beside an armchair lay reading glasses and a crossword with several answers missing.

She picked up the newspaper. A page had been folded back to hold the puzzle open; its corners had softened where a thumb must have rubbed them. She put it down in exactly the same position. Her list had made no provision for unfinished crosswords.

In the kitchen, somebody had left bread, fruit, bottled water, and a note from the woman who came to clean. The note was in English. The refrigerator had been emptied and washed. She drank a glass of water at the sink, then another, looking out at the pool. Under the surface, a leaf moved slowly toward the steps. There was a little tiled shower beside the wall and a towel hanging from its rail, bleached almost white.

Her father had been alive this spring. When she was marking papers at her kitchen table, when she was buying sunscreen because she meant to spend the summer traveling, when she had complained to a friend about being twenty-five without having done anything particularly interesting, he had been here. It was unbearable to think that she might have boarded a plane sooner if only she had known where to go.

She set the glass in the drying rack. Then she took it out again and left it on the counter. She would need it later. This small decision steadied her enough to fetch her bags.

The front steps seemed steeper from below. Her suitcase caught on each one, and by the last she was sweating. Across the lane, the workshop door stood open. She could hear a machine running, then stopping. The man appeared in the doorway just as she dragged the case over the threshold. He looked as though he might call to her. She raised a hand to show she had managed it, and went back inside.

Upstairs, she chose a bedroom facing the garden. It had a narrow iron bed and a wardrobe with nothing in it except spare blankets. She opened the shutters and found herself looking over the pool toward hills softened by the heat. The view was so entirely what people meant when they said Tuscany that she felt foolish standing before it in her travel clothes, with swollen eyes and her phone vibrating against her hip.

Her mother was calling. She sat on the bed and answered.

“I’m here.”

“Oh, good. You didn’t text.”

“I know. Sorry.”

There was a pause. She could hear the kettle at home, the familiar click of it being switched off. “How is it?”

She looked at the open window. “Big.”

“The house?”

“Everything.”

Her mother waited. She began crying again, quietly at first, then with an ugly breath she couldn’t disguise. She tried to tell her about the coat, but the word came out badly and she had to repeat it.

“You don’t have to do anything today,” her mother said.

“I didn’t know there would be shoes.”

“Oh, sweetheart.”

She lay down with the phone against her ear. The mattress creaked beneath her, and she thought of all the times her mother had sat on the edge of her bed when she was a child. The woman who had raised her was thousands of miles away, worrying about whether she had eaten, while she wept over a coat belonging to someone who had never called her.

They stayed on the phone until she could speak normally. She promised to eat and to send a photograph. She did not promise to stop packing, because the thought of having nothing to do in this house was worse than the thought of emptying it.

After the call she washed her face. In the bathroom mirror her green eyes looked startlingly clear above the swollen skin. She pulled her hair out of its elastic, combed through the knots with her fingers, and tied it up again. She had been wearing the same shirt since leaving America. She changed into shorts and a clean T-shirt, then carried her camera downstairs.

Outside, the light had lowered. Shadows reached from the cypresses across the lane, and the man was sweeping shavings out of his workshop. She lifted the camera toward the villa, stepped backward, and found she couldn’t fit the house into the frame without including him.

He stopped sweeping. “Am I in it?”

“A little.”

He moved behind the door. She took the photograph and checked it, then lowered the camera. His broom emerged first, followed by his head.

“Now?”

“You’re fine.”

“You sound doubtful.”

“That’s just how I sound.”

He came outside again. This time she smiled before she remembered she hadn’t meant to. He lost the thread of whatever he had been about to say. She noticed the pause, and the way his eyes returned to her face, but she was too tired to wonder much about it.

“There is a shop in the village,” he said. “For food. If you haven’t found it.”

“Someone left things in the kitchen.”

“Good.” He rested the broom against the wall. “I have your shutters here. Two from the back of the house. Your father asked me to repair them.”

She looked toward the corner of the villa, where an upstairs window stood bare. “Are they finished?”

“Nearly.”

“I suppose I should pay you.”

“We can talk about it another day.”

“I’d rather know.”

He considered her for a moment. “I will bring the estimate. What he agreed to. You can look at it.”

She nodded. It was easier to imagine her father as a man who had ordered repairs and left a bill than as someone whose shoes were waiting in the hall. She almost asked whether he’d been difficult to work for, then found she didn’t want an answer in the lane, with her camera hanging between them.

The man glanced at her bare legs and looked away. The movement was brief enough that she might have missed it if she hadn’t been watching him. He picked up the broom again, though the ground was already swept.

“I’ll bring it tomorrow,” he said.

“Thank you.”

She went back to the terrace. Through the lens she could see the jasmine flowers more clearly than she could with her tired eyes, the brown edges of petals beginning to die. She photographed them, then the empty chairs by the pool. She sent her mother the picture of the house, without explaining that she had waited for the carpenter to move out of it.

She ate bread and a tomato standing at the kitchen counter. There was olive oil in a cupboard, salt in a blue bowl. She found herself hungry halfway through eating and cut more bread, then carried the plate to the sitting room. With the windows open, the house had begun to cool. Somewhere overhead, a bird moved along the gutter with a sound like fingers tapping metal.

There was a desk beside the fireplace. She had noticed it earlier without approaching it, but now she took her plate over and sat down. The top drawer contained pens, rubber bands, an old checkbook. The next was locked. She tried the smallest key on the ring, mostly because it gave her something to do with her hands.

Inside were letters. Enough to fill the drawer, bundled unevenly with cotton ribbon, their envelopes worn at the corners. Some had American stamps. She set down her plate and lifted the first packet. On the uppermost envelope, beneath her father’s name and the address of the villa, someone had drawn a small bird in blue ink.

She loosened the ribbon. The paper smelled of the drawer, of wood and years shut away. A letter slipped free, folded into thirds. She opened it and found English written in a hurried, slanting hand.

“I am writing at the kitchen table, though I ought to be packing. You will say I always leave it too late. You are right, which is why I haven’t called.”

She read the lines again. Then she looked at the signature, at the name she had known all her life without having any memory of the woman who answered to it. Her mother’s name. The bread lay untouched beside her. Outside, she heard the workshop door close and the scrape of the carpenter’s gate. She held the letter closer to the window and began again from the first word.