Free Breathing Room by Susan Elizabeth Phillips Page B

on the faucet to splash her face, but the water refused to warm up.
    She hurried downstairs and tested the sink. It was the same. She searched for Marta so she could tell her they had no hot water, but the garden was empty. She finally located the card Giulia Chiara had left.
    "Yes, yes," Giulia said when Isabel reached her. "Is very difficult for you to stay there while so much work must be done. At the house in town you will not have to worry about such things."
    "I'm not moving to town." Isabel said firmly. "I spoke with...the owner yesterday. Would you please do your best to have the water fixed as soon as possible?"
    "I will see what I can do," Giulia said, with obvious reluctance.
    *
    Casalleonehad an old Roman wall, a church bell that rang on the half hour, and children everywhere. They called out to one another in the playgrounds and romped next to their mothers along the narrow cobbled streets that wound in a maze. Isabel drew out Giulia's card and checked the address against the sign. Although the street name was similar, it wasn't the same.
    A day had passed since she'd talked to the real-estate agent, and she still had no hot water. She'd called Anna Vesto, but the housekeeper had pretended not to understand English and hung up. Marta seemed oblivious to the problem. According to Isabel's schedule, she should be writing now, but the issue with the water had distracted her.
    Besides, she had nothing to write. Although she usually thrived on self-discipline, she'd gotten up late again this morning, she hadn't meditated, and the only words she'd written in two days had been notes to friends.
    She approached a young woman who was walking across the village's small piazza with a toddler in hand."Scusi, signora." She held out Giulia's card. "Can you tell me where the Via San Lino is?"
    The woman picked up her child and hurried away.
    "Well, excuu-se me." She frowned and headed toward a middle-aged man in a ratty sport coat with elbow patches. "Scusi, signore. I'm looking for the Via San Lino."
    He took Giulia's card, studied it for a moment, then studied Isabel. With something that sounded like a curse, he pocketed the card and stomped away.
    "Hey!"
    The next person gave her a"non parlo inglese" when she asked the location of the Via San Lino, but then a beefy young man in a yellow T-shirt offered directions. Unfortunately, they were so complicated that she ended up at an abandoned warehouse on a dead-end street.
    She decided to find the grocery store with the friendly clerk that she'd visited yesterday.
    On the way toward the piazza, she passed a shoe store and aprofumeria that sold cosmetics. Lace curtains draped the windows of the houses that lined the street, and laundry hung on lines overhead. "Italian dryers," the travel guide had called the clotheslines. Because power was so expensive, families didn't have electric dryers.
    Her nose led her into a tiny bakery, where she bought a fig tart from a rude girl with purple hair. When she came out, she gazed up at the sky. The high, fluffy clouds looked as though they should be printed on blue flannel pajamas. It was a beautiful day, and she wouldn't let even a hundred surly Italians spoil it for her.
    She was on her way up the cobbled hill toward the grocery when she spotted a newsstand with racks of postcards displaying vineyards, splashy fields of sunflowers, and charming Tuscan towns. As she stopped to choose a few, she noticed that several of the postcards depicted Michelangelo'sDavid , or at least a significant part of him. The statue's marble penis stared back at her, both front and side views. She pulled one from the rack to examine it more closely. He seemed a little shortchanged in the genitalia department.
    "Have you already forgotten what one looks like, my child?"
    She spun around and found herself staring into a pair of ancient steel-framed eyeglasses.
    They belonged to a tall, black-robed priest with a bushy, dark mustache. He was an exceptionally ugly man,