Three storefronts and four apartments above.
She’d paid for it, she used to say, “one loaf at a time, and the loaves are still in the walls.”
When I married Vincent, he had a culinary certificate, a good smile, and a plan.
The plan was a restaurant.
He needed a space.
My mother had a space — the corner storefront on Delmar, which had been a shoe repair and was empty.
“I’ll lease it to him,” she told me, at her kitchen table, twenty years ago.
“Not give.
Lease.
Ten years, then ten more if he’s good to you.
And Toni — I’m putting it in the name of the building, not in his.
He’ll say it’s cold.
Let him.”
He said it was cold.
At the signing.
“Your mother doesn’t trust me,” he’d said, laughing, and had signed a lease with M. Marchetti Properties LLC — a twenty-year term at a rent my mother set low, “so he can build something, and so I can watch him do it.”
She watched.
She watched him put his name on the awning and never once mention hers.
She watched him tell the newspaper he’d “found the space himself.”
She watched him send me in at four-thirty for eleven years, and she said nothing, because she was a woman who had come to this country with a notebook and had learned that you say nothing until the paper is ready.
When she d*ed, four years ago, the building came to me.
Only me.
Vincent had been at the reading of the will.
He had heard “the building at 1400 Delmar Avenue, including all commercial leases,” and he had heard it the way men like Vincent hear things, which is as noise between the parts about him.
He had never once, in four years, looked at his own lease.
The lease renewed every ten years.
The second ten-year term had begun in year eleven.
It would end — Cordelia found this in the first week — in fourteen months.
And it had one clause my mother had insisted on, that her attorney had called unusual and she had called “obvious.”
