“…holding a folder against her chest, was…” and I will tell you who it was, because I watched her through the window of the plant manager office with my heart going like a pulled strand of taffy. It was Megan. My granddaughter. She sat in the passenger seat of that black Range Rover, in a gray wool coat, with her hair pulled back and her face as white as the salt on a boardwalk pretzel. She was not smiling. She was gripping a manila folder in both hands, and when the car stopped, she did not wait for Jared. She threw open her door and ran toward the factory entrance.
Rob let her in. I met her in the lobby, beside the display case where my mother copper kettle now sat on a velvet cloth, shining under little spotlights, with a brass plate that read Szabo Sweets, Est. 1949. Megan stopped three feet from me. She was breathing hard. She said, in a voice like torn paper, “Grandma Helen, I did not know. I swear on Papa memory, I did not know.” I did not answer at once. I looked at her, at the granddaughter I had taught to pull taffy on the hook at the age of five.
Then I opened my arms, and she fell into them. She sobbed against my shoulder for a long time, in the middle of the lobby, while Rob discreetly pretended to study a clipboard. At last she held out the folder. She said she had found it that morning on Jared desk, under a pile of cryptocurrency printouts, while he was in the shower. Inside were bank statements from Philadelphia, a copy of the reverse mortgage, and a document she recognized with horror. It had her own signature on it. Added as a signer, in August. On papers Jared had told her were for a tax refund.
A steel plate welded under a copper kettle, a forged mortgage in an envelope, and a granddaughter running toward the factory door.
The front door banged open. Jared came in, in his sunglasses and his expensive jacket, with a smile he had put on in the parking lot like a mask. He said, in his oily, friendly voice, “Grandma Helen, Megan is upset. There has been a misunderstanding. Let me explain everything.” I said, quite pleasantly, “Please do, Jared. I have time. I have a copper kettle and eight million dollars and nothing to do until supper.” His smile flickered. He looked at Megan, who stared at him as if he were a stranger, and then at me, and then at the big glass window behind us.
Outside, parked neatly beside his Range Rover, was a black and white police cruiser. Rob had phoned them twenty minutes earlier, after I told him what I had learned. Two officers came in, one a heavyset sergeant with a mustache named Kovacs, the other a young woman named Officer Brandt. The sergeant asked Jared politely to remove his sunglasses. He asked if he was acquainted with a business called Kline Digital Holdings. Jared said he was not. Megan, trembling, opened the folder and handed over the bank paper with his name on it. He turned the color of skim milk.
Linda Kline arrived an hour later, in a pressed navy suit, with her notary stamp in a leather pouch, summoned by her son in a panic. She had always been the kind of woman who believed that a good reputation could be carried like a handbag. She stood in my lobby, with her chin raised, and told the sergeant that she had notarized thousands of documents and had never made an error. He asked her to describe the day she had notarized my signature. She said, “Mrs. Szabo was present. She signed in my presence.” I said, “Linda, I have never been to Bethlehem.”
She wilted like a lettuce leaf in August. The sergeant took her stamp and her journal. Within the week, the Pennsylvania notary commission had suspended her, and the district attorney had filed charges against both of them. The bank in Philadelphia froze the account, and, because I had reported the fraud within days, recovered all but eleven thousand dollars of the stolen money. The reverse mortgage was voided in writing. My house on Tilghman Street was mine again. I celebrated by going home, taking off my shoes, and eating a whole sleeve of saltines in front of the television.
Megan moved into my spare room that weekend. She had filed for divorce, and she cried a great deal, in the kitchen, in the garden, once in the cellar, among the jars of peach preserves. I did not offer advice. I made tea. On the fourth day she asked me a question I had not expected. She said, “Grandma, do you remember what you said when I was little? That the best thing about taffy is that you can always pull it again, even after it breaks?” I said I remembered. She said, “Teach me.”
The new owners were kind. They kept the Szabo name on the sign, and they asked, to my surprise, whether I would consider consulting on the old recipes, and training a small crew to make them by hand, in a corner of the factory, on a copper kettle. I said yes, on one condition. That the first apprentice be my granddaughter. They agreed. And so, on a cold morning in January, at five o clock, before the sun was up, Megan and I put on our white aprons, tied back our hair, and lit the burner under the old kettle.
We cooked the sugar and the salt and the cream. We poured it out, steaming, onto the marble slab. And we stood side by side, at the iron hook on the wall, and began to pull. Her hands were soft, at first. Mine were old. But the rhythm came back, hand over hand, stretch and fold, the way my mother had taught me in a garage on Second Street. The taffy turned from amber to pale gold, and the whole room smelled of vanilla and butter. Megan laughed out loud. She said, “Grandma, it is still warm.” I said, “It always is.”