The second page was shorter than the first, and my hands were so cold that I held it by the very edges as if it might burn. I am Teresa Gallo, sixty three years old, and I sat in the lawyer office on Westminster Street with the whole family watching, my brother Vincent weeping across the table, and a single line of ink at the top of the page in the careful hand of my mother. It said, Teresa, this is not a test. At the bottom of the page, under her name, was an address in Warwick, and a telephone number.
I read the first line aloud, as the will required. “My darling girl. I have never once heard you complain.” My voice shook. “You worked beside me for forty years, and you never asked what you were owed. I kept something from you, and I am sorry. On the day Michael left in 1989, I did not know what Vincent had done. I found out a year later. I was a coward. I let you believe that the man you loved had walked away from you without a word.”
Michael, wrote my mother, had never stopped asking. Every Christmas for thirty one years, a card with no return address had arrived at the bakery for me, and every year she had put it in the drawer under the register. She had not been able to throw them away. She had not been able to give them to me. There were thirty one cards. The drawer was locked. The key was taped under this page. And Michael Ricci, who had never married, lived in a small yellow house on Post Road in Warwick.
A second page folded behind a will gave one daughter the afternoon to bring her brother back to the bakery on Federal Hill.
I gave my terms to the room, though I confess I had to wipe my eyes twice before I could. “Mama set a condition that no child of hers could meet, and I think she knew it. Vincent cried first, and I am crying now. So the will is silly, and the lawyer can read the rest.” The lawyer, Mr. Corrado, a kind man with a thin white moustache, unfolded the final paragraph and read it twice in his slow, careful voice, because he knew how much it meant to every person leaning toward him in that quiet room full of cousins and old coats and the smell of cold coffee. My mother had known. The estate, two million, two hundred thousand dollars, was to be divided equally, and the bakery was to be mine.
Vincent lifted his wet face. “Teresa,” he said, “I lied to Michael because I was jealous. You had a man who looked at you the way no one ever looked at me. And when you stayed to work for Mama, I got to stop working. I told myself it was a favor.” He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “I have been sick about it for thirty five years. I do not expect you to forgive me. I only want you to know that I know.” I told him I would try.
But Vincent, in his old fashion, could not leave well enough alone. The shame was too much for him, and he sprang up, snatched the second page from my hands, and bolted for the stairs, meaning to tear off the corner with the address. He was at the top step when Uncle Sal, eighty four years old and built like a fire hydrant, put out one stubby arm. Behind Sal stood four cousins from Cranston, all in their church clothes, who had arrived late and still held their coats. They did not even raise their voices.
“Vinnie,” said Uncle Sal, “give the page to your sister.” That was all he said. Vincent looked at the cousins, and at Sal, who had bounced him on his knee, and his arm dropped. He handed the page to Sal. Sal handed it to me with a small bow, and then he patted Vincent on the back, harder than strictly necessary. “Now,” he said, “we are going to go downstairs and eat something, and then you are going to drive your sister to Warwick, and you are going to wait in the car.”
The money consequences were arranged by Mr. Corrado with a clean hand. Vincent took his half of the estate in a structured account that paid his expenses and nothing else, under the eye of a cousin. The bakery and the three buildings on Atwells Avenue, which I had worked in since I was fifteen, were mine. I did not sell. I painted the door red again and brought back the zeppole on St. Joseph Day, and the old men of the neighborhood came and stood in line on the sidewalk, pretending they had only stopped to read the newspaper in the window, exactly as they had done when I was a girl behind the counter in a paper hat. And Vincent, to the surprise of the whole family, signed up for a meeting on Tuesdays.
In the name of my mother Rosa, who passed in October, I started the Rosa Gallo Fund. It pays for baking apprenticeships for young people and for gambling counseling for families, in Providence, Kent and Bristol counties. In the first year we placed twenty six apprentices in neighborhood bakeries and sent fourteen families to counseling. One was a pastry cook from Cranston who had been losing his wages at the track, and who now makes the wedding cakes of three parishes.
I knocked on the door of the yellow house on a Sunday in November, with a loaf of anise bread in my hands, and Vincent waited in the car, as instructed. The door opened. A tall gray man in a cardigan stood in the hall, and for a long minute neither of us spoke. “Teresa,” he said, in the same voice. Then he saw the loaf, and the old crooked smile came, and he stepped back and held the door wide. “I kept the cards,” I said. “I mean, she did.” “I know,” he said. “Come in. The coffee is on.”
