...And Never Let HerGo

restaurants in Boca, which was very formal and had many-course gourmet meals.
    “We all wanted to wear shorts and T-shirts, and Tom got all dressed up,” the attorney said. “We asked Kay what she wanted to do, and she just looked down at the ground—it was clear that Tom made the decisions.”
    At length, the vote among the group was to go to the casual hangout. “Tom wouldn’t get out of the car. He just sat there. When we finally got him to come in, he stood at the end of the bar with a poker face and brought everybody down.”
    It was only one night, but it was a look into another side of Tom Capano. When he got his way, he was absolutely wonderful to be around. When he didn’t, he could be coldly furious.
    At Christmas 1979, Kay and Tom had exciting news to share with the family. There would be no need now to arrange for an adoption through Catholic Children’s Services; Kay was pregnant, due in August.
    Maybe life was too good. In 1980, Marian was thirty-five. Tom, Louie, and Joey were thirty, twenty-eight, and twenty-seven, respectively. Gerry was going on seventeen. Aside from some broken marriages, the “good” Capanos had had a remarkably smooth life. But on the bright edge of spring, they suffered a loss from which they would never recover. It was February 28, 1980, and Louie and his father were working together when Lou suffered a massive heart attack and died. He was fifty-seven years old.
    Thousands of people came to pay their last respects to Louis J. Capano Sr. as his funeral services were held at McCrery’s Funeral Home on Concord Pike. They were people who lived in the homes he’d built, worked for him, went to church with him, or just had heard of his reputation as a humble, hardworking Italian immigrant who had made his fortune in America—while still keeping his humanity and honesty. It was the end of an era, more than anyone could realize then. Tom asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made in his father’s memory to St. Anthony’s of the Hills summer camp. And the money poured in.
    Marguerite Capano was totally unprepared to lose her husband and hadn’t the slightest idea how to manage her life without him. She was certainly too devastated even to begin to cope with a teenage son, and Gerry wasn’t nearly as easy to raise as his three older brothers.
    Tom stepped in and took over all of her bookkeeping and household worries; he was there every day for his mother, paying her bills, explaining the will, handling everything that his father once did. Marguerite didn’t know what she would ever have done without him. She was fifty-seven, rattling around in a house that was suddenly far too big, and trying to raise Gerry without his father.
    Louie and Joey were there to run the business, and Tom was there for his mother. Among them, they rode herd on their baby brother. Somehow they would all have to find a way to go on without the driving force in their lives.
    Kay never resented all the time Tom spent with his mother. She was a strong woman who could take care of herself even though she was pregnant, keep on with her job as a nurse-practitioner, and comfort Marguerite, too. If Kay had any weaknesses, there was only one.
    And that was her husband. Her world turned around Tom.
    In August 1980, Kay gave Tom his first child, a little girl they named Christy. The baby made up for a lot of pain that everyone in the Capano family had felt that year.

Chapter Five
    T HE C APANOS were nouveaux riches in Wilmington, and they had ridden high on the wave of postwar building for the DuPonters. Although they were shattered by losing their patriarch, there was little chance they would ever be poor again.
    The MacIntyres were old money, entrenched in Wilmington society for fifty years through their association with an industrial giant almost as old and important as DuPont. Bancroft Mills, more formally known as Joseph Bancroft and Sons, was established in 1831—108 years before Joseph Capano emigrated to Delaware with his wife and three sons. Bancroft Mills was American history, a fledgling cotton mill on the banks of Brandywine Creek, with Joseph Bancroft working his crew and his family seventy hours a week, enduring floods and hardship while still building a business that would survive more than a century.
    In 1931, a hundred years after Bancroft started his mill, William Ralph MacIntyre became the first non-Bancroft to serve as president of the company, and he ran the company during its