Gina unfolded the contract on the dining room table and smoothed the creases with the heel of her hand. She read the letterhead, a restaurant group with an office on Boylston Street in Boston, and then she read the first clause, and then the second, and then she stopped and went back to the beginning. “Five point nine million dollars,” she said. “For DiNapoli. For all five.” She raised her eyes to me. They were wide and dark and full of something I did not expect, which was shame. “Rita, I thought you were struggling. Anthony said you were barely hanging on.” I said, “Anthony says many things.”
Anthony put his phone face down on the table, then turned it over, then turned it face down again. “Ma,” he said, “that is not fair.” I said, “Is it not? Then tell me what is fair. Tell me about the certificate of deposit that your father bought with his last Christmas bonus. Forty thousand dollars. Cashed in June by my agent. Which is you.” I placed the bank letter on the table beside the cannoli. “They also charged me a penalty of two thousand dollars. For the privilege of being robbed.” Anthony looked at the pastry box, as if the answer might be hiding in the soggy shells.
Gina said, in a low, controlled voice, “Anthony, the stair lift.” He said, “Gina.” She said, “You told me she needed a stair lift and that it would cost nine thousand dollars. You said you were paying out of your bonus. I believed you.” She laid the contract down. “Your mother has no stair lift. She has never had a stair lift. And you told me, while we were standing in my kitchen, that you were taking care of her.” Anthony gripped the edge of the table. For the first time since I had known him, my son looked small.
A soggy box of cannoli at a Sunday table brought a restaurant contract and a bank letter into the open and gave one widow the afternoon to bring her son back to the deli.
I opened the pastry box and took out a cannoli. I broke it in half. The shell, as I had suspected, had gone soft, and the ricotta was oozing out at one end. I placed half in front of Anthony and half in front of Gina. “Eat,” I said. They looked at me. “Eat. It is Sunday.” Anthony took his half, slowly, and bit into it, and chewed, with his eyes on the table. “It is not as good as yours, Ma,” he said. His voice cracked. “Nothing is.” I said, “That is what happens when you buy from the wrong bakery.”
He laughed, and it turned into a sob, and he put the back of his hand against his mouth. “I am so sorry,” he said. “I am so ashamed. I lost money in a deal last year. I invested with a guy, and it fell apart, and I did not know how to tell Gina. I thought, I will use the CD for a month, and put it back.” He shook his head. “I know that is what everyone says. Ma, Pop would be so disappointed in me.” I said, “Your father would be disappointed that you thought you could not tell me.”
I reached across the table and took his hand. His palm was damp and trembling. “Anthony,” I said, “I raised you above a deli. I taught you to count change at nine years old, at the register, standing on a milk crate. I never once said money was more important than you.” I squeezed. “If you had come to me and said, Ma, I am in trouble, I would have given you the forty thousand. I would have given you more.” He wept. Gina reached across and put her hand over ours, and for a moment the three of us sat there, joined, like a knot in a rope.
I told them the terms. The power of attorney would be revoked and the house listing torn up. The forty thousand, plus the two thousand in penalty, would be returned, a set amount every month, from Anthony, with Gina keeping the books. The folder from the assisted living place would go into the trash. And Anthony would come to the deli every Saturday morning at five, to work the counter and the slicer. “You will wear an apron,” I said. “You will make sandwiches for people who do not care that you are my son. And you will learn why your father got up at four every day for thirty years.”
He came the first Saturday in a pressed shirt, which was a mistake. By seven he was covered in mayonnaise. The regulars loved him. A man in a Red Sox cap said, “Hey, Rita, who is the new kid?” and I said, “That is my son.” The man said, “He is a little slow.” I said, “He is learning.” Anthony, behind the counter, flushed to the roots of his hair and kept slicing. By nine in the morning, the line was out the door. At noon, he sat down in the back on a milk crate and ate a meatball sub with his eyes closed.
The restaurant group kept the name DiNapoli on all five shops, and put a small plaque by the register on Shrewsbury Street, which reads, Founded by Sal and Rita, 1979. Anthony asked me once, at the end of a long shift, whether I would ever forgive him. I was wiping down the slicer. I said, “Anthony, I have forgiven you for things you have not even done yet. That is what a mother is.” He nodded. “I just want to be worth it.” I said, “Then be here on Saturday. Five in the morning.”
On the first anniversary of that Sunday, Gina came to the deli with a pastry box. Inside was a tray of cannoli, hand filled, with a ribbon around it. She had made them herself, from my recipe, which I had written for her on an index card. They were not perfect. Some of the shells were pale and some too dark. But the filling was sweet and cold, and the shells snapped when I bit them, and I stood in the middle of my own deli with my eyes closed, tasting all the years that had brought me here.