I unfolded the old deli apron slowly and set it flat on the tablecloth, between the meatballs and the plate of sliced bread. The white cotton had turned the color of tea, and a long dark stain ran across the front where Sal had once dropped a pot of red sauce on the first day of the Fourth of July rush in 1982. Danny reached out, almost without meaning to, and touched it with one fingertip. Wrapped inside, in a fold, lay a small steel key on a loop of twine, and a single folded paper. “Ma,” he said quietly. “What is this?” I held up the key. “It is for a door,” I said. “On Lark Street.”
I handed him the paper. It was a lease, signed on the fourth of September, for a storefront on Lark Street in Albany, with a big front window and a bakery oven in the back. The tenant was listed as Danny Marchetti and Gloria Marchetti, jointly, for twenty years, at a rent I had paid in advance for the first five. “Sal and I opened the deli when we were younger than you are,” I said. “I have sold the original building and the name. Three million, nine hundred thousand dollars. But I am not finished feeding this city. I want you to open the new one. With your name above the door.”
Danny read the lease three times. His hands were shaking. He is a quiet man, my son, built like his father, with a barrel chest and sad brown eyes, and in forty six years I had never seen him cry. “Ma, I cannot,” he whispered. “I cannot take it. They think that I stole from you.” “They think nothing of the kind,” I said. “They know that your sister lied.” I turned to Gina. She was sitting across from me in her silk blouse, with her makeup beginning to run, and the empty chair of her husband behind her. “I have something for you, too, Gina. I would have preferred a different kind of day for it.”
An old deli apron unfolded on a Sunday table held the key to a new storefront and showed who really took the money.
I laid three more papers on the table. The first was a statement of facts, signed by the man at the bank in Saratoga Springs. The second was a letter from my lawyer, Mr. Rizzo, on his stiff cream stationery. The third was a short handwritten note, which I read aloud. “Dear Mrs. Marchetti, I am sorry to tell you that the money in question was spent on a boat, a vacation house on Lake George, and private school for two children. I will cooperate fully. Paul Reinhardt.” Gina had stopped breathing. She stared at the note as if it were written in a foreign alphabet. “Paul wrote that?” she said. “He came to my lawyer on Friday, by himself,” I said. “He wanted to make it right.”
Gina broke then. All the poise she had worn at Easter fell off her like a coat. “Mama, I did not mean for it to go this far,” she said. “At first it was just a little, to cover the mortgage. And then it was the school, and the club. And Paul kept saying you would never notice. And Danny was right there. It was so easy to say it was Danny.” She was sobbing openly now. My sister in law, Rosa, sitting at the end of the table, put a hand over her face. “I knew he would never fight me,” Gina said. “I knew he would just stand there and take it. That is the worst part. I used the fact that he is good.”
Danny had not said a word. He sat with the lease in front of him and his large hands flat on either side of it. At last he looked up, and what he said I will remember as long as I live. “Gina, I never wanted the money. I wanted my sister.” She stared at him. “You let everybody think I was a thief. For months. At church, at the bank, at the deli, people stopped looking at me.” He swallowed. “But I forgive you. Because Pop would want me to. And because I am tired of being angry.” He stood up, and the two of them held each other, brother and sister, in the dining room where they used to roll meatballs on Sundays.
The terms were simple, and Mr. Rizzo had drawn them up carefully. Gina and Paul would repay all eighty one thousand dollars within sixty days, by selling the boat and the house on Lake George. They would write a letter to the congregation at Saint Anthony, where Gina had told her story, and they would withdraw their children from private school and find a public one. In exchange, I would not report the thefts to the district attorney.
I told Gina plainly that it was the choice of a mother, not a legal one, and that she should not mistake it for weakness. She nodded without speaking. Her mascara had run to her chin.
They kept their word. In November, the boat sold at a marina in Lake George for sixty two thousand dollars. By Christmas, the house followed. Gina took a job as a dental receptionist in Troy, humble work, honest work, and she began to arrive at the deli on Saturdays to wash the trays. The first Saturday, she stood at the sink for four hours, with her hair tied up in a scarf. Danny came out from the back and put a hand on her shoulder. He did not say a word. She dried her hands on her apron, the same cotton as Sal, and went on washing.
The new deli of Sal and Danny opened on Lark Street on the first Saturday of March, with a big blue awning and a hand lettered sign in the window. A line of fifty people waited outside before the doors unlocked. Mrs. DiNapoli, ninety years old, cut the ribbon with a pair of kitchen shears. I stood in the back, at the counter, with the old apron tied around my waist, rolling meatballs in the same fashion I did in 1976. The first customer in line was an old man with a cane, who looked at me and said, “Gloria, is that you?” I told him I had never left.
