I did not hit Vinnie, and I did not shout. I did what I have done on the line of a galley for twenty two years when a dish comes back wrong: I took a breath, and I looked at what was in front of me. A forged document. A stamp that belonged to a man in a federal prison. A woman who had not eaten a warm meal in days. Then I took out my phone and put it face up on the table, with the little red circle already counting seconds, and said, in my kitchen voice, “Vinnie, tell me about the notary.”
He was so sure of himself that he talked. He leaned against the refrigerator with a yogurt in his hand and laughed through his nose. “Sally Fusco,” he said. “A friend of your sister. He does a little paperwork on Passyunk Avenue, taxes, titles, whatever. He bought the stamp for a hundred bucks off a guy who was going away. Fifty a signature, Tony. It is not even a crime if the old lady signs.” “She signed with no glasses, in a kitchen with no light, for a man she did not know,” I said. “That is not a signature. That is a stain.”
“And the loan?” I asked. “In Miami. In my name.” For the first time he stopped smiling. I watched the color go out of his face the way the color goes out of a sauce that has been left too long on the flame. “I do not know nothing about that,” he said. But his eyes went to the door, and then to the phone on the table, and I knew. It was Angela, and it was Vinnie, and it was Sally Fusco with a stamp that had belonged to a man in Lewisburg. They had been robbing my mother and me with the same pen for over a year.
A son who comes home early can still set the whole table right, one warm plate at a time.
I put the pawn tickets in my pocket. I wrapped my mother in her own coat and drove her to the emergency room at Jefferson in the middle of the night, where a young doctor named Patel looked into her mouth and her ears and wrote, in a very small hand, malnourishment and neglect. A social worker came. A police officer came, a woman in her thirties named Marchetti from the elder abuse unit, who listened to the whole recording standing in the hallway with her arms crossed. When it ended, she said, “Mr. Ruggiero, please do not go home tonight.” I said, “I was not planning to.”
At six in the morning I walked into the Broad Street Pawn & Jewelry with the three tickets in my fist and the money for them in an envelope, and an old man in a green visor named Feldman took one look at the tickets and put down his coffee. He went into the back and returned with a plastic bag. Dentures. Hearing aids. Bifocals with a bent arm. “I had a feeling, when the young man brought them,” he said. “Nobody pawns teeth. I held them eleven days.” He pushed away the envelope. “Take her home, son.”
I put the glasses on my mother myself, in the hospital bed, then the hearing aids, one at a time, with her little ears in my hands. She looked at me, and the whole world came back into her face, and she said, in a voice I had not heard in months, “Anthony. You have gotten fat.” I laughed so hard that the nurse put her head in the door. The dentures went in last. She ran her tongue over them, as a child does with a new tooth, and then she smiled at me, a big, whole, ridiculous smile, and I put my forehead against hers, and cried.
They arrested Sal Fusco at his office on Passyunk Avenue on Monday morning, in his shirtsleeves, with the stamp still in the drawer and two other powers of attorney on the desk. They arrested Vinnie Russo at the Atlantic City bus station on Sunday night, where he had gone to meet Angela, and they arrested her too, with a bag of scratch offs and a bus ticket to Florida. In the interview room my sister told the detectives everything, and then she asked, in a small child voice, whether our mother would ever speak to her again.
I went to see Angela in the county jail on Thursday. She sat across the glass in an orange jumpsuit, thinner than I remembered, and did not look up. “I am not here to yell,” I said. “I am here because Mama asked.” Her shoulders began to shake. “Tony, I did not mean for it to go that far. Vinnie said it was only paperwork. Then it was the money. Then it was the teeth.” I let her cry. When she was done, I said the only thing I had planned to say: “Do your time. Learn something. And when you come out, Mama will have a plate for you.”
Angela pleaded guilty and was given four years. Vinnie got nine. Sally Fusco lost his stamp, his office, and his freedom for six years. The bank that issued the loan in Miami erased it from my record, with a letter of apology. The money I had sent for two years, which I had thought was lost, was traced in part to an account in the name of Vincent Russo, and the court ordered it returned. It was not all of it. It was enough to put a new roof on the house on Mifflin Street, and a new furnace, and a ramp for the back door.
I gave notice to the cruise line in December. Twenty two years of galleys, and it was time to feed one person. On the first Sunday in January I stood in the kitchen of my mother, in an apron, with a pot the size of a drum on the stove, and she sat on a stool beside me in her new glasses with her hand on my wrist. She tasted the gravy. She frowned, as she always did. She added a pinch of salt. She tasted again, and she looked up at me with her whole face. “Now it is right,” she said. “Mangia, Anthony. You are home.”
