We moved suddenly from Minisink Hills to Rome, Italy. My father called me out to the carport where he was washing #7, the British racing green MG-B and he made this change sound like the beginning of the most important adventure. I didn't believe him.

"This is what your mother wants," he said.

I had a crush on my first grade teacher, Mrs. MacIntosh, whose father was famous for having written "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," and I was infatuated with the next-door neighbor, Leah Lewellyn, who'd had polio and walked with a carved wooden cane. She let Bay and me use her yard like it was an extension of our own. Her house had two stories and felt like a lodge. Bucks' heads and a porcupine frozen in motion had been mounted on the walls, and the fireplace's ledge was stone and wide enough to serve dinner on. We ate our lunch there.

Bay and I liked stairs because our house was split level, and we'd use any excuse to go up and down Mrs. Lewellyn's. An overlook looked wrapped around the living room, and from the second floor I had an aerial view of the sofa, the knotted rug, the bowl of candy centered on the heavy glass coffee table. We didn't get on Leah's nerves. She fried us potato pancakes with apple sauce on the side and treated us better than the children she couldn't have.

I was always ready to attach myself to the next one who might give me a home, because the people I loved stayed for a while and then went away, or, in my grandmother's case, kept me and then had to give me back.

We sailed out of New York harbor on the Cristoforo Colombo, and my Nonna looked down at her shoes and wept bitterly, as if she'd been robbed, a foster family duped by a suddenly healthy mother. My grandfather looked apologetic. Aunt Carmel held a streamer in each hand, blue for Bay and red for me, and we stayed connected by crepe paper until the middle snapped and the ends floated down to the water.