The man in the navy blazer was Anthony Marchetti, chief executive of the candy company, and he took his time. He walked slowly across the shop floor, past the barrels of saltwater taffy and the glass jars of fudge, until he stood directly in front of my window. The whole shop had gone silent. A little boy with a cone of ice cream stared at us. “Mrs. DiNapoli,” Mr. Marchetti said, “I read your letter four times. It is the finest letter I have ever received from a customer, and I run a company of three thousand people. May I read it aloud, with your permission?”
I nodded. My arms were still around the hook. Mr. Marchetti took a folded page from his breast pocket and read in a steady voice. “To whom it may concern. I am Rose DiNapoli, eighty years old, of sound mind and body. I count change faster than my son. I have been told by him that I am his ward. This is not true. No court has declared any such thing. Please do not send my money to anyone but me. On Labor Day at four oclock, I will be in the front window of my shop. Please come, and bring a lawyer. I would like my son to explain.”
The shop was so quiet I could hear the taffy hook creak. The face of Vincent had gone from pink to gray. The woman with the briefcase, Ms. Rao, stepped forward and said she was an elder law attorney from Philadelphia. She took a single sheet from her folder and laid it on the counter, next to the register. It was the forged letter of guardianship that Vincent had mailed to the company in August. It carried the seal of a judge in Atlantic County who had, the attorney said, never heard of Rose DiNapoli.
A letter tucked under a cash drawer gave one mother the Labor Day to bring her son back to the family in Ocean City.
I gave my terms as I stepped down from the window, wiping my hands on my apron. “Vincent, you will close the register. You will turn the sign on the door to closed for the afternoon. Mr. Marchetti, I would like to sit with you and my lawyer at the table in the back, where the fudge is cooling. And Vincent, you will sit with us, because I am your mother, and I am going to tell you the truth.” He followed me like a boy, his shoulders drooping. Nobody in that shop took a photograph. The tourists stepped quietly outside.
At the table in the back, my son wept. He said the shop was a hundred sixty thousand dollars in debt. The ice cream machine had broken, a cooler had failed, the lease went up. He did not know how to tell me, and he did not want me to see him fail. When he heard about the money from the candy company, in a conversation with an old friend of Sal at the bank, he thought, just for a month. Just until the creditors calmed down. “I did not want to steal from you, Ma,” he said. “I wanted to save the shop.” I told him he had it backwards.
Then Vincent reached across the table and tried to snatch the forged guardianship letter from under the hand of the attorney. He missed, spun, and ran for the back door that opens to the alley behind the boardwalk. There he met Gus Pappas, from the fudge shop next door, a big man of sixty five with flour on his apron, who had come over to see what the commotion was. Gus held a full tray of fudge in both hands and did not move. “Vinnie,” he said, “I have known you since you were in diapers. Sit down before I drop this on you.”
Vincent sat down on a crate, in the alley, with his apron half off. I came out and sat beside him. We watched the seagulls pick at a dropped funnel cake. I said I forgave him, because that is what a mother does, and I said I would not pay his debts, because that is also what a mother does. “You will sell the ice cream cases and the lease on the second floor,” I said. “You will learn the books. And you will pay me back with your own two hands, one pull of taffy at a time.”
The money consequences were firm and fair. The candy company wired the full six million, one hundred thousand dollars to my account in Atlantic City the next morning. The forged letter was referred to the authorities, and Vincent agreed to a diversion program with community service. He paid off the shop debt in four years, slowly, with a loan from me at two percent. I hired myself back at thirty dollars an hour, which I think is fair. He keeps the books now, and he has never been late with a payment.
In the name of Sal, who passed in 2020, I started the Sal DiNapoli Fund. It pays for rent and first year costs for small family shops on boardwalks in Cape May, Atlantic and Ocean counties. In the first year we helped fourteen shops open, from a fudge stand in Wildwood to a pretzel cart in Sea Isle City. A young husband and wife from Somers Point opened a taffy counter in June, and cried when they sold their first pound. I showed them how to pull it. They still have the hook.
On the next Labor Day, the boardwalk was packed again, and I stood in the front window of the shop pulling taffy on the steel hook, ten pounds at a time, in the heat. Vincent worked the register, whistling. A little girl pressed her nose against the glass and asked her mother whether the lady was a real person. I waved, and she waved back. A woman beside her said, “That is Rose. She has been pulling taffy since 1964.” I pulled a long white ribbon and smiled.
