Part 3 — The Steel Box
The whole store was watching me hold up the little brass key on its shoelace, and nobody in the paint aisle moved.
“Your father bolted a steel box under the register counter in 1984,” I said to Dominic. “I did not know until last week. He told me on the day he died that it was for when I needed it.”
Dominic laughed, but it came out thin. “Ma, I have stood at that register for thirty years.”
“And you have never once looked under it.”
The contractor with the PVC cart stepped back to give me room. I got down on one knee, which took a while, and I reached under the counter with the key.
The box was gray steel, painted over so many times that it looked like part of the wood. The lock turned like it had been waiting.
Inside lay a manila folder, a bundle of savings bonds, and a letter on Marino Hardware stationery.
I read the letter aloud in the aisle, because Vinny would have wanted it that way. “Frannie, the store is Dominics to run, but the building is yours, and so are the bonds. If he is good to you, give him the lease. If he is not, give him the door. I trust your heart, and I trust your judgment more.”
Forty years my husband had hidden an answer under a counter that his son leaned on every day, and the answer was that I should be the one to decide.
The bonds came to eighty-four thousand dollars. I used sixty-five of it that same week to pay off Dominics bank loan, the one I had co-signed. The rest I put in an account in my own name at the Bayonne credit union.
Dominic stood at the register with his hands flat on the counter. He did not say a word for a long time. Then he walked around, took my arm, and walked me to a chair.
He apologized, there in the store, in front of the customers. He said he had been scared of the loan, and the fear had curdled into meanness.
I wrote up a real lease the next week with a lawyer on Avenue C. The rent was what Vinny had charged, six hundred forty dollars, and Dominic would repay every extra dollar he had taken from my rent.
My apartment door had a new lock, and my key worked. Vinnys chair was back by the window.
The next morning at six I went down the back stairs with a buttered roll and a hot coffee and left them by the register.
Dominic was already there. He had unlocked the shop, and he had not eaten first.