by David Riley

She had to make a choice. If she had stayed in Italy with my father and me, then she would have lost the right to come to America because she would have been 21 the next year, and no longer a minor.

So she made the choice of leaving my father and me in Italy and coming here to join her family and find work, pretty much, because work in southern Italy was pretty sparse. My mother was a schoolteacher in southern Italy. My father was a shoemaker, so it was a little harder for him to find work.

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