The black Lincoln across the street from my bakery had been sitting there since six in the morning, and at nine it finally opened its door. I stood at the front window in my apron, seventy six years old, with flour on my forearms, and watched a man in a dark overcoat step onto the sidewalk. He crossed Bellevue Avenue unhurriedly, looking neither left nor right. Behind me the ovens ticked and the bakery smelled of anise. Luz, my head baker of twenty two years, had stopped kneading and stood with her fists in the dough. My daughter Gina, at the counter, put down her coffee.
The man introduced himself at the door as Detective Sergeant Paul DeLuca of the New Jersey State Police. He had been sitting in the Lincoln all morning, he explained, because the bank in Hammonton had called him the previous week about a pattern of withdrawals from the account of the late Sal Fiore: nineteen of them in two years, one hundred and fifty eight thousand dollars in all. The signature on each slip was a good imitation of mine. It was not mine. The bank manager, Mr. Tran, stood behind him on the sidewalk, holding the slips like a hand of cards.
I turned slowly to Gina. She had gone the color of the flour. My son in law Vince, who had been rolling out cookies at the back table the whole time, wiped his hands on a towel and did not look up. I knew it all by then. Vince had been losing at the tables of the Borgata for years, and Gina, who loved him, had forged her own mother, one slip at a time, to cover it. I had known it a week. I had said nothing, because the first thing a mother does is hope.
A recipe box opened in a bakery kitchen gave one widow the morning to bring her daughter back to the oven in Hammonton.
I gave my terms at the counter, with the recipe box of Sal under my hand. “Sergeant DeLuca, I will not stand between you and the law. Gina, you will tell him everything, and I will tell him that you came forward before you were found, which is nearly true. Vince, you will go with the sergeant, and then you will go to the program in Camden, and when you come out, we will talk. The bakery stays. The recipes stay. I have not sold them for five million, six hundred thousand dollars, and I do not intend to. This box is staying in this kitchen.”
Gina came around the counter and fell to her knees on the tile, in front of the whole bakery. “Mama,” she said, “I wrote your name on the first slip with my hand shaking so hard that I tore it. I told myself I would put it back on Friday. Then there was another Friday. Every time you gave me a hug, I wanted to scream.” She gripped the hem of my apron. “I did not steal it for me. I stole it for him. And I would do it all over again, and that is the worst part. I would. Please, Mama.”
Vince, hearing the word program, threw down his towel, grabbed the little steel box of Sal that sat on the table, which he thought held cash, and bolted for the back door of the bakery with it clutched under his arm. He had a clear run to the alley. Then Luz, who was five feet tall and had spent twenty two years lifting fifty pound sacks of flour, snatched up a marble rolling pin in each hand. Six bakers in white aprons did the same. They lined up in front of the door, and Vince slid to a stop in the flour.
He opened the box, expecting cash. Inside were three hundred and eleven index cards, in the handwriting of my mother and my grandmother, with recipes for biscotti and pizzelle and anginetti, stained with butter and anise. Vince stared at them. Then he looked at the six bakers, who stood armed with rolling pins, and at Luz in the middle, who did not blink. “Put it down, Vince,” she said. “That is the mother of Mrs. Fiore.” He set it on the table, as carefully as a priest placing a chalice, and Sergeant DeLuca stepped in.
The money consequences were firm. Vince was charged with theft and forgery, and Gina, who cooperated, was given probation and treatment. The bank restored the full one hundred and fifty eight thousand dollars to the account, since its own tellers had accepted the slips. The offer of five million, six hundred thousand dollars for my cookie recipes was refused, and I licensed a single line of biscotti to a company in Philadelphia for a fair royalty, with the right to bake every other recipe myself, forever, in Hammonton.
In the name of Sal, who passed in 2018, I started the Sal Fiore Fund. It pays for ovens, mixers and apprenticeships for families recovering from gambling, in Atlantic, Camden and Burlington counties. In the first year we placed fifty one apprentices with bakeries. One was a young man of twenty two from Vineland who had lost three jobs. He learned to make anginetti in a basement kitchen, and when the first tray came out of the oven golden, he turned to me and said it was the first thing that had gone right in years.
Gina came home from the program after five months and stood at the back door of the bakery on a Monday morning before dawn. I was alone with the ovens. She did not speak. She tied on an apron from the hook by the door, washed her hands, and picked up a ball of dough. I stood beside her at the long steel table, and showed her how to flatten it with the heel of the hand, the way my grandmother had shown me. We worked without a word until the first light came through the window.
