...And Never Let HerGo

Marie was headed for Wesley College in Dover. Even with student loans, though, she would have to work. She quickly found a job as a waitress. All the Fahey kids were making it. By giving each other hands up, they had climbed out of the bad times on Nichols Avenue. Getting Anne Marie through high school and into college was a major accomplishment—not only for her, but also for her siblings.

Chapter Four
    W HILE THE F AHEYS gritted their teeth and made it through a tough decade, everything the Capanos touched turned to gold, although it was dicey from time to time.
    In 1970, with a great deal of trepidation, Louis Sr. decided to diversify his company; he had been building luxury homes, but the bottom was falling out of that market. People were looking for apartments within easy commuting distance of Wilmington. Lou bought land along I-95 and planned to build a large apartment complexthere. He wanted to have a steady cash flow that he could count on when he retired, but the project meant borrowing more money than he had ever imagined.
    The Cavalier Country Club complex was the biggest construction venture ever attempted by a builder in Delaware. There would be nine hundred units, apartments first and then ninety-six town houses to be sold outright. Louis Jr. was all for diving into real estate in a big way; he had a gift for it. He was attending the University of Delaware when his father got involved with Cavalier. Tom was far away at college in Boston and wasn’t interested in the construction business, anyway.
    The Cavalier project got under way, but when Lou Capano had to borrow money from his friends to make his first payment on the huge loan, he had visions of everything he’d worked for going down the drain. A project full of houses was one thing; nine hundred apartment units was a concept almost too big for him to grasp. “We really struggled,” young Lou recalled. “We scraped for every last dime.”
    In 1972, when Louie was a senior in college, he realized that his father couldn’t afford to pay real estate commissions. He needed an agent who would work for free. Louie quit college, got a real estate license so he could start selling the town houses, and jumped in to help his father. Lou Capano had invested in sons as well as real estate, and Louie had come through for him.
    Slowly, the Cavalier project began to generate cash, and then, with Louie’s natural gift for real estate, their fortunes grew exponentially. They had pulled off an almost impossible venture, son and father standing shoulder to shoulder. Joey dropped out of college, too, and Louis Capano & Sons, Inc., was in full swing.
    They bought the Branmar Plaza, a big moneymaker in Brandywine Hundred, and the Midway Shopping Center in Milltown. It both impressed and alarmed Lou to watch his son seek out property. “My father was the kind of guy who said, ‘OK, fine. Take over the whole thing,’ ” Louie recalled. “He really didn’t like the financial end of things. He let me do whatever I wanted. I was buying and selling land—my father
never
bought land he didn’t develop.”
    Lou still believed that a real builder turned his hand to fine houses. He bought a chunk of oceanfront property from the Catholic church in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, on the south end of Seven Mile Beach. Stone Harbor had a lot more cachet than Wildwood and was slated to be decidedly upscale. Villa Maria by the Sea,a nuns’ retreat, abutted Lou’s Stone Harbor lot. Villa Maria was a big white barn of a place with wide lawns.
    Development in Stone Harbor hadn’t even begun until 1970, and it was carefully planned, with wide streets and ordinances that would control future construction. Lou built a beach house in Stone Harbor for his family, and it demonstrated his vision. It was far more than a beach house; it dwarfed even the Weldin Road house. It rose majestically from the white sand and sea grasses and was over five thousand square feet, its oblique angles stained a rich brown, with skylights and walls of windows that faced only the sea beyond. The Stone Harbor place was more than a decade ahead of its time. When Lou built it, it sat alone on the beach, with an unobstructed view across the dunes to the endless expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.
    There would be no more sleeping on mattresses on the floor. The Capanos all had their own rooms, and so did visitors, and their own access to a private beach. They swam and turned mahogany in the sun while Marguerite