And then there is Eli.
Daniel’s boy.
Eleven years old.
He has Dorothy’s eyes, that particular gray-green I have only ever seen in two human faces.
He is the reason I agreed to go to Rome.
Dorothy left a will. She was precise about everything, and her will was no different. Specific. Detailed. Witnessed. Notarized. Filed with Gerald Whitmore, our family attorney of twenty-two years.
She left the house to me outright. The investment accounts stayed in my name until my death. After that, they were to be distributed equally among the three children, with separate education trusts for Eli and Lisa’s two daughters.
No mystery.
No drama.
Except for one paragraph near the end.
Gerald read it to me privately after the funeral.
“Tom,” he said, folding his hands on the desk, “Dorothy added this codicil three weeks before she passed. She asked me to read it to you alone. She said you would understand why.”
The codicil said:
Thomas, if you are reading this, I want you to know that I changed the beneficiary structure on the annuity accounts. They go directly to you, not to the estate. To you personally. If you decide to share them with the children, that is your choice to make freely and not under pressure. I love you. I have always loved you. Be careful.
Be careful.
Two words.
Dorothy never wasted words.
I thought about those two words often in the months after the funeral.
Daniel called in September asking whether probate was moving forward. Lisa called in October asking whether I had thought about liquidity. Kevin called in November, drunk, asking why everything was taking so long.
I told all three of them the same thing.
Gerald was handling it.
They needed to be patient.
The trip to Rome was Lisa’s idea, at least on the surface.
She called in January with a voice soft enough to sound like mourning and bright enough to sound like hope. She said she wanted to do something meaningful for my seventieth birthday. She said Dorothy would have wanted us together. She said Eli had been asking about Italy.
“Wouldn’t it be beautiful, Dad?” she said. “Wouldn’t it be healing?”
I said yes because of Eli.
Because Dorothy would have said yes.
Because I was seventy years old and I had been to Italy exactly once, for four days in 1989, and I remembered standing inside the Pantheon thinking I needed to come back with more time.
That is the part that embarrasses me most now.
I said yes because of Eli.
And because of the Pantheon.
We flew out of Columbus on a Tuesday morning.
All of us.
Daniel and his wife, Renee. Lisa and Brett. Kevin, who showed up at the airport already smelling like he had taken something in the car. Eli, who held my hand through the security line and told me that in Rome there was a fountain where you threw in coins to make sure you came back.
“We have to do that, Grandpa,” he said. “We have to make sure you come back.”
I thought he meant come back to Rome.
Now I am not sure.
The flight was ten hours.
Daniel sat next to me for the first two and talked about the real estate market, opportunity zones, liquidity, and timing. He said, almost casually, that he had been thinking about whether I would be open to restructuring the family finances while we were all together.
“A trip like this is a perfect time to get everyone on the same page,” he said.
I looked at my oldest son and saw a man trying to make greed sound like organization.
“This is not the time to talk about money,” I told him.
He smiled.
Then he put in his earbuds.
We landed in Rome at seven in the morning local time. The city came up beneath the plane like something from a painting. Eli pressed his face to the window.
“Look, Grandpa,” he whispered. “Look at all of it.”
The first three days were almost good.
We stayed in a hotel near Piazza Navona. Eli and I walked everywhere. We saw the Pantheon, and it was exactly what I had waited thirty-five years to see again. That impossible dome. The oculus open to the sky. A column of light falling onto the marble floor like the building itself was breathing.
Eli stood beneath it with his head tipped back.