What happened in 1974 was the reason Rosa never signed anything in her life without reading it twice, and I told it to Nicky on the floor of the basement of State Street, sitting on a milk crate beside the open green safe, with Vito Palumbo holding a flashlight. In 1974 we were three months from losing the first shop. A fire in the shop next door had ruined our oven and the insurance man did not return calls. Rosa walked into a church office on East Fourth Street, sat down in front of a monsignor with a pencil mustache, and signed a paper. She never told me what was in it until the day she was sure I would survive hearing it.
The paper gave half of the business, forever, to a trust for the children of Erie who could not pay for lunch. The monsignor was Monsignor Rizzo from St. Paul, who ran a soup kitchen, and he put up the money for the new oven out of a parish fund that took in only nickels. In exchange, Rosa promised that half of whatever Ferraro Pizza ever earned would belong to the children. She called it the end piece, because the end piece is the one nobody wants and the one that tastes best. She wrote her note for Nicky in 2019 and put it on top of the safe.
Nicky sat there with the note in his hands, the one in her slanted writing. “Nicky, it is not in here. It was never in here. Ask your grandfather what happened in 1974.” Under it, at the bottom of the safe, was the trust paper itself, sealed in plastic, with the signature of Rosa and the stamp of the notary. “She knew you would come,” I said. “She knew one of us would, someday, wanting half. She wanted you to hear it from me, in the room where she kept it.” His face crumpled. He said, “Nonno, I do not even know what to say.” I said, “Then say nothing. Eat.”
A green safe gave one grandson the length of a snowy Sunday to bring his grandfather back to the truth in Erie.
I gave my terms to Nicky and Brianna at the back table of the State Street shop, the one where Rosa did the books, with a pizza between us and the first snow of the year hissing on the window. I told them the half of Rosa belonged to the trust, that it could not be signed over, sold or loaned, and that anyone who tried would answer to the diocese. I said Nicky would work the counter on Saturdays for one year to learn what the half was for. I said I would not tell the family what he had done, if he did.
Nicky took his hands out of his pockets and spread them on the table. He said his consulting business had lost three clients in the spring, and that the parents of Brianna had stopped lending to them, and that he had watched Ferraro grow into nineteen shops while he looked at a bank account with a four digit balance. He said he told himself the half of his grandmother was owed to him, as a kind of rent for his childhood. “Nonno, I thought you had so much, and I had so little,” he said. “I never asked how much of it was ours.” I said, “None of it was ours, figlio. It was borrowed.”
Brianna, who had been sitting very still in her white coat, did the unexpected. She snatched the trust paper from the middle of the table, meaning to run it out to their car and tear it into a hundred pieces, and she bolted through the front door of the shop and into the snow in her expensive suede boots. Nicky shouted her name. Vito dropped a pizza peel. I stayed in my seat and took a bite of my crust. I have made pizza for fifty eight years, and I know exactly how long a thing takes to cool.
The first lake effect squall of the winter had arrived at that exact minute, as it does in Erie, without any warning, and in four minutes the street was a white wall. At the curb, a city plow driven by Bruno Antonelli, who has eaten at our counter every Friday for thirty years, was pushing a ridge of snow the height of a pickup. It slid right in front of the car of Brianna. She stopped with her boots in a snowbank up to her knees. Bruno rolled down the window of the cab, took in the scene, and said, “Mrs. Ferraro, that is a lot of snow for such nice shoes.”
Brianna handed the paper back to me herself, dusted with snow, and then, to my surprise, put her face in her gloves and wept. Nicky worked the counter on Saturdays for a full year, in a paper hat, and learned the names of the regulars. The successor of Monsignor Rizzo at St. Paul blessed the trust in the spring. Brianna stopped wearing white. They moved to a smaller house in Millcreek and sold the car. Nicky now stretches dough the way Rosa did. Half the time it lands on the floor, and he says, “Again.” I now have dinner with them every second Sunday, and nobody orders Domino.
In the name of Rosa, who passed in 2021, I started the Rosa Ferraro End Piece Fund. It pays for hot lunches and school lunch debt for children in Erie, Crawford and Warren counties. In the first year we cleared the lunch debt for four hundred and twelve students, and the first was a third grader from the east side named Marisol, whose mother cleaned offices at night. A volunteer from the new national owners of the shops brings a box of end pieces to the school every Friday, with a note that says, “The best part is yours.” The trust of 1974 now has a second signature, mine.
This past Sunday evening, after the shop closed, Nicky and I sat at the back table where Rosa used to do the books. He had a cold slice on a paper plate. I had the end piece. We ate without talking, the way she liked it, and the radiators knocked, and snow came down outside on State Street like flour. Then he said, “Nonno, it tastes better cold.” I said, “That is what she told me in 1967.” I looked at the empty chair across from us, and I could swear it was warm.
