He just never read the lease.”
Carmela looked at me for a long time.
“She used to send bread to my house,” she said finally.
“Every Christmas.
I thought it was from the restaurant.”
“It was from her.
He put the restaurant’s card on it.”
Cordelia told me something in month nine that I’ve kept.
“Toni, I’ve done two hundred divorces.
The husbands who did the most damage never once used the word ‘we’ in a deposition.
It’s always ‘I built,’ ‘I found,’ ‘I developed.’
And the wives sit there and don’t correct it, because correcting it sounds small, and by the time they’d like to correct it, it’s twenty years and the record’s full of ‘I.'”
“So what do you do?”
“You don’t argue with the ‘I.’
You find the one document that says ‘she’ and you put it on the table.
Your mother wrote that document in 2006.
She wrote it with a pen, in her name, for this.”
“For a divorce?”
“For whatever came.
Toni, a woman who leases a building to her son-in-law at a low rent and puts an injury clause in it isn’t planning a divorce.
She’s planning a rescue.
She just didn’t know yet what she’d be rescuing you from.
So she wrote it wide.”
Vincent came to the building on Thursday.
Not to the restaurant — he’d stopped going in, Cordelia said, “because a man who’s just been told he’s a tenant has trouble walking through the door” — but to the bakery.
My mother’s.
Which I’d kept open, three days a week, with two of her old bakers, because the ovens were paid for and the loaves were still in the walls.
He stood in the doorway in the good suit.
“Toni.”
“Vincent.”
“This is — okay.
Whatever Cordelia’s doing with the lease.
That’s a technicality.
Your mother was — she was sentimental, she put things in writing that she never meant to — “
“She meant every word.
She wrote the clause about false statements twenty years ago.
She wrote it about you.
She’d met you.”
“I built that place.
I built it.
