“Because I am the man who sold it, Frank,” I said. The father of Gina is named Frank Mancuso, a barrel chested man with a gold chain and a car dealership in New Hartford, and he stood there with the paper in one hand and the other on the oven door, his big face puzzled. “In August I sold DeLuca Bakery to a food company in Rochester. All four shops, the name, the recipe, every oven and mixer and sheet pan. Six million seven hundred thousand dollars.” I pointed to the page. “Item three on Schedule A is the oven you are standing next to. My father carried it up from Brooklyn in 1958. The buyer owns it.”
Nobody in the bakery moved. The line at the door, thirty customers deep, had gone silent, and a small boy with a cannoli looked from face to face. Joey stood on his milk crate behind the counter in a white apron, thirty eight years old, with his hair gelled and his jaw hanging, and I saw him begin to shrink inside his own clothes. “Uncle Dom,” he said, “you said you were retired.” I said, “I am, Joey. From a business I no longer own.” He said, “You never told me.” I said, “I know. I wanted to see what you would do.” Gina, at the register, put her hand to her mouth.
Frank Mancuso had not yet understood the whole of it, I think, but he was a man who had sold ten thousand cars, and he could smell a bad deal at fifty paces. He looked at the boyfriend of his daughter. “Joey,” he said, in a slow, flat voice, “you told us you built this from nothing. Your own recipes. Your own money.” Joey said, “Mr. Mancuso, it is more complicated than that.” Frank said, “Is it?” He picked up the photocopy of the recipe card with the stamp across the top: Property of Mohawk Valley Food Group. “Because this says your uncles father wrote it in 1958, and sold it in August.”
A deck oven with a family name stamped on its handle drew a car dealer across a bakery counter and gave one tomato pie baker the evening to bring his nephew back to the dough.
Joey climbed down off the crate. He walked around the counter, wiping his hands on his apron, and stood in front of me in the middle of the bakery with two hundred eyes on his back. I thought for a moment that he would run. Instead, to my surprise, he took a deep breath, and let it out, and said, “He is right. I took the oven. I took the mixer, and the proofing cabinet, and I copied the card.” His voice was steady but his hands shook. “I told myself you did not need them. I told myself the new owners would never miss them. I wanted to build something that was mine.”
“Joey,” I said, “look at the oven.” He turned. It sat there against the wall, black iron and brass, with a pie rack of golden tomato pies cooling on top and the word DeLuca stamped on the handle. “That oven baked bread for the mill workers in the winter of 1958,” I said. “It baked your first communion cake. It baked the wedding cake of your mother. My father stood in front of it every day for thirty seven years, and when he died, he died holding the peel.” My voice failed me. I waited. “It is not an oven. It is a family. And you cannot own a family by taking its furniture.”
His face crumpled. I had not seen my nephew cry in thirty years, not since he was eight and his father left, and he stood in the middle of that bakery and wept like a child. Gina came out from behind the register and stood next to him. She did not touch him. She only stood there, very straight, and said, “Joey, you told me it was the oven of your grandfather.” He said, “It was. In a way.” She said, “In what way?” He could not answer. “I think,” she said quietly, “that you should tell the whole story of this place. To everyone. Right now. Starting at the beginning.”
So he did. He climbed back up on the milk crate, and he told them. The oven, the sauce, the recipe card, the lie on the chalkboard. How his Uncle Dom had given him a job when his marriage fell apart. How he had stood at the back counter at nineteen, watching a man of seventy make tomato pie, and had thought, one day. He did not look at me. When he finished, no one spoke. And then, from the back of the line, an old woman in a headscarf said loudly, in the accent of the old neighborhood, “Domenic DeLuca, your father would be proud of you.” I laughed in spite of myself.
I made my terms in the back of the shop, over a plate of tomato pie, which I will admit was very good. The oven, the mixer, and the proofing cabinet would be returned to the buyer within the week, on a truck that Joey would hire himself. The name on the chalkboard would be changed. And if the company in Rochester agreed, Joey would work in the main bakery on Bleecker Street for a year, under a new manager, at a baker wage, learning every step of the recipe, from the flour to the Romano. “At the end of it,” I said, “you will be a baker.”
The company agreed. Joey spent that year in a paper hat, arriving at three in the morning and leaving at noon. His hands cracked from the lye in the dough pans. He got a burn on his forearm that he still shows with a certain pride. By the end of it he could roll sixty tomato pies in an hour, and judge the heat of the oven by holding his palm near the door. One morning in October, the manager came out and said, “Dom, the boy has it.”
I came by that afternoon, at the end of the shift. The bakery was quiet and smelled of yeast and sweet sauce. Joey was alone at the long steel table with a single pie before him, plain and square and perfect, with a little Romano on top. He handed me a fork. I took a bite. It was the pie of my father, exactly, warm in the center and tender at the edge, and for a moment I could not swallow. “Well?” Joey said. His voice was hoarse. I put down the fork. “It is the best I have ever eaten,” I said. “Do not tell your mother.”
