“It is, Sofia,” I said, and I put my arm around my nineteen year old granddaughter, who had come downstairs in her pajamas with her hair standing up like a rooster. “Sit down, sweetheart. You are the only one at this table who already knows.” The ocean came in through the screen door, salty and cool, and the eggs on my daughter plate had stopped steaming. Brian, my son in law, was looking from Gina to me. His mother Carol, who had driven down from Wildwood for the weekend, set her coffee cup on its saucer without a sound. I took the white envelope in my hands, and I did what I should have done on the fourth of July.
Inside was the sale of Delvecchio Taffy, eleven shops from Cape May to Rehoboth Beach, seven million eight hundred thousand dollars. I read the figure out loud. Gina made a noise in her throat. “Mama, you sold the shops? You never said a word.” I looked at my only daughter, who was forty eight years old, who had left me on a bench on the boardwalk in the middle of the fireworks and gone home to a barbecue. “I told your daughter last summer,” I said. “I told her because she asked me what I was going to do with my life, and I did not have an answer for her. Now I do.”
Sofia took my hand under the table. “Grandma told me she wanted to leave the shops to the people who work in them,” she said, in her small steady voice. “The pullers, the wrappers, the girls at the counter. She said a business that makes people happy should belong to the people who make it.” She turned to her mother. “Mom, you were so mad at me for saying anything. You told me not to bring it up. You said Grandma was confused.” Gina put her fork down very slowly. Her face was the color of the salt on the window sill. Brian said, “Gina, what is she talking about?”
A granddaughter remembered a secret from last summer, a wedding dress came home, and the taffy shops went to the hands that pulled them.
It came out the way a flood comes through an old seawall, one board at a time. Gina had been telling her friends for a year that I was declining. She had called my doctor twice. She had visited three memory care homes in Egg Harbor in May and put a deposit down on one, in her own name, with a check drawn on a joint account I had forgotten we shared. “Mama, I thought I was protecting you,” she said, tears running down. “You forgot the stove twice. You called me Maria one afternoon.” I said, “Gina, Maria is your grandmother name. I was remembering her. That is not a disease. It is love.”
Brian had gone quiet in a way that frightened me. Then he said, “Gina, how much money are we short?” She flinched. “Eighty one thousand dollars,” she whispered. “The house on Asbury. The kitchen. The boat loan. I thought if Mama went into a facility, I could manage her accounts.” Brian dropped his head into his hands. His mother Carol, who had said almost nothing, rose from her chair and walked around the table. She did not go to her son. She knelt beside me, an elegant woman of seventy, in the middle of my kitchen floor. “Mrs. Delvecchio, I am so deeply sorry,” she said. “Please let me stay and help.”
The dress still lay on the table beside the white envelope, ivory silk, hand sewn in Naples in 1938, with the price tag from the vintage shop on the boardwalk dangling from the sleeve. I had paid four hundred and fifty dollars to buy it back. Gina had sold it to the shop owner for sixty dollars, to cover a bounced check. I touched the lace collar. “Your grandmother sewed every stitch of this by hand while she was waiting to hear whether her family in Italy was safe,” I said. “It is not a dress. It is a letter that took eighty years to reach you.”
“I will not take my mother out of her chair at this table,” I said. “But I will not pay your debts either, Gina. The shops are already sold, and the proceeds are in a trust. Three million goes to the Delvecchio Workers Trust, which will buy the shops from the new owner and give them to the staff. Three million goes to Sofia, and her sisters, for school. The rest is mine until I need it.” I took her hand, rough and damp. “But I will give you something better than money. I will take you to a family counselor in Ocean City, every Thursday, and I will sit with you.”
Gina cried until her shoulders shook. Brian put his arms around her, and for the first time that morning, they looked like what they were, two frightened people in a house they could not afford. The decision was made that day. The Asbury house would be listed, the boat sold, and they would rent an apartment near the shops. Carol offered to cover the first three months, and I let her, because a mother who offers to help her son pay for his mistakes has understood something that I spent my whole life trying to teach. Sofia hugged her mother and said, “Mom, I never stopped loving you. I only stopped lying.”
On the third of September, we reopened the first shop on the boardwalk, as employee owned. Eleven people gathered at the copper kettle, the same kettle Sal and I bought in 1967. We pulled the first batch in the window. Gina stood at the hook with her sleeves rolled up, awkward and red faced, her hands covered in butter. A little boy pressed his nose to the glass. She pulled and folded, folded and pulled. She looked at me, and I nodded. The taffy turned from amber to cream, shining in the light, and she laughed out loud for the first time in years, like a girl of nine.
Sofia wears the dress to nothing yet, because she is nineteen and has years of boys to ignore. But last week she took it out of the cedar box, held it up against herself in the mirror, and asked me to teach her how to say the Italian blessing in the letter. I translated it again, slowly. For my daughter and her daughter after her. Wear this when you marry someone who will never leave you on the side of the road. Sofia read it three times. Then she whispered, “Grandma, I think Mom is the person who needs to wear it first.” I could not stop crying.
