Three Graces of Pearl Street

by Elizabeth Wellington Rollins

Genres: Family Life; Siblings

Synopsis

In this tender, voice-driven debut novel, an Italian American grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter find their lives—and their secrets—colliding when, after years apart, they come to live under the same roof, together finding courage to be the most authentic versions of themselves.

When three generations of powerful Valentini women find themselves living under one roof in the old family home for the first time in years, they’re forced to reckon with not only each other, but with womanhood itself. Named after a statue in a country two of them have never seen, and one refuses to return to, they must finally come face to face with the secrets and tensions that have been dictating their lives for as long as they can remember.

Graziella, the ninety-six-year-old matriarch of this Italian American family, spends her days running not only her family, but her church’s food kitchen, keeping everyone fed in their suburban New York neighborhood. Her daughter, Grace, is feeling uninspired at work, battling the throes of menopause, and most urgently, trying to stay afloat amidst her impending divorce. Ella, granddaughter of Graziella and daughter to Grace, is stuck in limbo, tired of trying to defend her vegan diet and anti-capitalistic lifestyle, while still wanting to do something important with her life.

Lyrical and emotional, The Three Graces of Pearl Street examines the intricacies of what it means to balance tradition and modernity, along with the difficulties and joy that comes from being around family who know and love you the most.

Release date: September 1, 2026

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 416

Sample

Chapter One: Christmas Eve CHAPTER ONE Christmas Eve
Arriving at 125 Pearl Street, Ella paused and then knocked on the door, which felt odd, given that she had spent every day of her childhood here. Her ninety-six-year-old nonna, who stood at four feet two inches tall, took one look at Ella and slammed the door shut.

Graziella Valentini had never been more disappointed in a person, a feeling she almost always reserved for men. Not when she found out Pope Pius XI had cooperated with Mussolini; not when her neighbor across the street installed sixty-seven garden gnomes in his front yard; not when her late husband dropped dead of a heart attack while making wine in the basement. The heart attack was not his fault, after all, but their granddaughter was. She had to be, because Grace was his fault too.

The connection between the three Graziellas, once as vital as an umbilical cord, had lost its pulse. For the past five years, Ella had only acquiesced to seeing them on Easter and Christmas Eve, which for an Italian-American family was equivalent to a declaration of war. Ella had first grown distant during her last year of college. She knew that visiting her grandmother’s home today was likely to turn into a diplomatic incident.

“Nonna. Are you going to let me in?” Ella yelled, banging on the door.

“No,” Graziella yelled back.

“No wonder she doesn’t invite us to Brooklyn,” Grace whispered to Graziella before opening the back door with a glass of red wine in one hand. Ella walked into the kitchen, and Grace hugged her. “How was the train, honey?”

Ignoring them both now, Graziella picked up two hot platters from the stove with hand towels.

“Fine,” Ella said, her body rigid in Grace’s grip. Grace let go, as though letting her daughter go was the most natural thing in the world.

“I’m sorry your dad couldn’t be here,” she added reflexively. Ella’s father lived in Bermuda and commuted “home” once a month. Ella never saw him, and he didn’t seem to mind, which racked Grace with a double dose of guilt despite her having no responsibility for either of them.

“I’m not sorry,” Ella replied, taking off her puffer coat.

Grace’s eyes took in her daughter’s brittle frame—as delicate as the bony fish on the stovetop—and despair washed over her. Ella’s loose, cropped shirt hung off the sharp edges of her collarbones and revealed the top of her insulin pump above her right hip. Grace softened her face, focusing on the light in Ella’s chestnut eyes, knowing that her gaze would be felt by her daughter.

Graziella had no such sensitivities for her granddaughter’s feelings. Unable to contain herself at the sight of such dire neglect, she put down the platters with a clang and grabbed Ella’s hands, not out of warmth but to monitor their chill.

“Mostriciattola!” Graziella yelled in frustration. Ella’s childhood nickname meant “little monster.” It was supposed to be endearing, although it rarely felt that way.

Graziella ran so hot, she burned Ella to touch. She shook herself free. It was as if they thought her body was theirs rather than hers. It wasn’t a new phenomenon. When Ella was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age five, the endocrinologist taught Grace and Graziella to recognize the clinical signs of dangerously high and low blood sugar.

In practice, avoiding both was a near to impossible challenge for Grace and Graziella, who were charged with balancing Ella’s volatile blood sugar. Early mistakes in either direction meant an ambulance was called at home or at school. Much to Ella’s benefit and regret, their knowledge of her condition soon surpassed the limitations of science and the boundaries she now wanted to have as an adult. The two older women developed a sensitivity to Ella’s blood sugar the way a cat feels the weather change in its inner ear. Before Ella exhibited any symptoms of a blood sugar rise, Grace and Graziella were chasing her with a finger prick and an insulin pen—backstage before a choir performance, through a haunted house on Halloween, at a middle school dance.

Grace had tried to turn off this extra sense once Ella turned eighteen. It hadn’t worked. Sometimes, she woke up in the middle of the night certain Ella’s blood sugar was too low, despite her firm belief against superstition. Her profession as a psychologist forbade such magical thinking. Still, how else to explain the time she had tripped on the Upper West Side, sensing a blood sugar drop, and later discovered that Ella had fainted in a library nearby when her levels had bottomed out?

Graziella muttered something unintelligible and turned back to preparing the seven dishes she summoned from memory every year for the Feast of the Seven Fishes, an act of commemoration for her mother who had passed them on. Regardless of what anyone said about Christmas, Graziella believed it was a holiday for women—particularly women giving birth in dire circumstances, of which there were infinite variations. Ella did not understand, or she would take better care of herself. It had not been easy for the Valentini women to bring children into the world, let alone keep them alive. The problem was that Graziella’s daughter, a renowned psychologist and Columbia professor, had overlooked the innate in favor of the intellectual. Grace spoke of parenting as if it were a philosophy. Parenting had failed Ella, and the girl had folded in on herself like thin paper bending into origami. This was how she’d become the empty shape that had arrived at Graziella’s back door.

She spotted a large hole the size of a baseball in the back of Ella’s trousers, right under her tush. She wanted to pinch the skin there as a reminder that any old pervert on the subway could do just that.

“You need new pants,” Graziella said, heading into the dining room.

“I can get some at work,” Ella replied.

“You mean you’ll pull them out of the trash,” Graziella shouted back. Ella worked at Big Apple Bargains, the tristate area’s largest charity thrift shop, sorting through donations at their flagship location near Times Square.

“Let’s not talk about appearances,” Grace said diplomatically. She followed Graziella into the dining room with more platters.

“Did the priest say the Latin wrong or something?” Ella muttered, following her.

“I’ll never understand why you pretend to be stupid. You know St. Joseph’s hasn’t had a Latin Mass since the Second Vatican Council,” Graziella shot back while shoving a serving spoon under the calamari.

“Let’s stay away from religious stuff tonight too,” Grace said.

“It’s Christmas Eve, Grace. Do you think it’s about shoring up the economy like the rest of your generation?” Graziella asked.

“She has a point about capitalism,” Ella replied.

“I wasn’t talking to you!” Graziella said, pointing a finger at Ella.

“At least she hasn’t called you trash.” Ella looked at Grace, who pulled out a chair and sat down. A strange, life-size china baby Jesus with a crown of thorns stared her down from the mahogany sideboard. She had always hated that doll. There was no music playing. Despite Graziella’s religiosity, or maybe because of it, she did not indulge in Christmas cheer.

“I’ve never called you trash. You work in trash. You are surrounded by trash. You wear trash. The hole in your pants is so big someone could put a fist up there,” Graziella clarified.

“Now go fetch the baccalà.”

Ella shook her head as she walked back into the kitchen. The smell of baccalà alla romana, salt cod and potatoes stewed in San Marzano tomatoes, made her ravenous. She had always craved fish, so much so that in school she had brought sardine salad—a Graziella-made alternative to tuna salad—for lunch every day for six years until she realized that “fish fingers” wasn’t a compliment.

She placed the platter on the table. Even one of these dishes would be too much for three people. Six more oversize platters adorned the table, yet there was nothing that Ella could eat.

“Nonna, is there anything else I can grab?” she asked, trying for casual.

“No. It’s the Feast of the Seven Fishes,” Graziella said. She rushed through grace, speeding up her voice as if she were a pharmaceutical advertiser rattling off side effects. Her hands flew toward the serving-ware, diving into this most sacred Italian-American tradition. She heaped portions of each platter onto the old china plate in front of Ella: fried smelts, marinated eel, anchovies with endive, calamari salad, seared scallops, spaghetti with clams, and her beloved baccalà. Ella’s mouth watered, rebelling against her.

“Is something wrong with the fish, Ella?” Grace said, sensing some silent conversation occurring.

“I’m vegan now, actually,” Ella said, looking at her grandmother, who already knew. Graziella only sped up the movement of her hands.

“Oh.” Grace shut down the instinct to grip her daughter’s wrist to check her pulse.

“Do you have anything I can eat? Canned chickpeas?” Ella asked.

“Only dried beans. Canned are too expensive,” Graziella said.

“They’re cheaper than seafood.”

“Chickpeas are peasant food,” Graziella spat.

“Your dad was a peasant,” Ella replied.

“Exactly,” Graziella said.

“If we had known, Ella, I’m sure Nonna would have…” Grace began to say.

“I called Nonna about it months ago. She told me not to bring anything,” Ella snapped, balling her hands into fists.

“The only reason you’re starving yourself is because you were so well-fed as a child,” Graziella said, eating a bite of calamari.

“There’s a serious body of research about the seafood industry harming ocean ecosystems. There’s one study of shrimp in Thailand alone that’s very compelling—”

“Are you insulting my fish?” Graziella interrupted Ella, her hands whirling through the air like helicopters. Insulting Graziella’s fish meant insulting the third-generation fishmonger down the road, which was tantamount to treason.

“Studies say veganism is good for diabetics,” Ella replied.

“Then why do you look like you’re dying?” Graziella shot back. “If I showed up to your house looking like Dracula’s last victim, would you feed me peanuts and potato peels?”

“I’d be relieved,” Ella said. Graziella bit back the impulse to tell her granddaughter that she was dying. Though it was subtle, it was no less true. She could feel her own body slowing down like a train pulling into the station. Everybody died. It was not something to make a fuss about unless she needed it for leverage, and that moment was not now.

“If your doctors think it’s okay—” Grace began to say.

“It doesn’t matter what her doctors think. It’s common sense. Protein stabilizes her numbers. Her numbers are all outta whack.” Graziella waved her fork around in the air like a battle flag.

“Nonna, our global food system is killing people,” Ella replied.

“You always miss your own point in the service of making it,” Graziella said before taking a bite of the baccalà. No one responded, and Graziella thought her namesakes must be too slow in the head. “Hurting no one? Do you need to go back and read the Greeks? There is a self and you are that self. Or would basic biology be more suitable for a college dropout? You are hurting a mammal named Ella Myers: a trash collector who squats in a warehouse and worries her mother sick.”

“Are you insulting trash collectors now?”

“I’m insulting you.” Graziella pointed her fork at her granddaughter. “No trash collector would have such poor judgment at twenty-two, let alone twenty-seven. Cristoforo Colombo, your grandfather, was storming Omaha Beach when he was twenty-two.” Always it came back to this, back to the moment five years ago when Ella had most disappointed her family.

“Ella’s doing important work for Big Apple Bargains, Ma,” Grace said.

“You should be giving the stuff away to the people who need it, for goodness’s sake. Not selling it for profit,” Graziella said back.

“Ma, it’s an established nonprofit,” Grace replied.

“It’s putting her in an early grave,” Graziella added.

“Can you stop insulting me?” Ella said. Grace, unable to override her instincts, stood up to find something for Ella to eat.

“No, Grace. I’ll find something,” Graziella said. She had spent her life feeding an entire neighborhood of people, stray cats, and even the occasional dog. Ella was the only one who wouldn’t eat her food. There would be no more parenting.

Graziella returned with a can of ocean fish cat food. She pulled back the top of the aluminum container with the bravado of a maestro. Ella felt her stomach curl, deeper than the hunger and the nausea that accompanied plummeting blood sugar.

“Ma,” Grace yelled, standing up.

“The old cat is having your baccalà tonight. You won’t eat your fish, you eat her fish.”

Ella snatched the can of cat food from her grandmother’s hands and threw it at the figurine of baby Jesus like a Yankees pitcher gunning for the playoffs. It hit the doll and splattered all over the stark white wall behind it. Baby Jesus tottered and then fell onto the floor.

Grace gasped. Ella ran out of the house, passing her grandmother’s old cat with no name. Ella refused to be disrespected like this. She vowed she wouldn’t come back to Pearl Street until there was a funeral.