Jill Porter | Fire took everything from S. Phila. teen

JUST SIT here and wait, firefighters told Debbie Lombardo. Your mother isn't inside the burning building, they said.

So, the 14-year-old sat on the stoop outside her cousins' house hoping desperately they were right.

But she knew better.

She knew her mother would have been frantic to find her and tell her about the fire that destroyed their lifelong home and the family store in the Italian Market.

After all, Debbie was Domenica Lombardo's life. She was all she had - other than Rocky the dog, whom she hand-fed table food and served drinking water from a cup.

An excruciating hour passed until Fire Commissioner Lloyd Ayers came to tell Debbie what her heart already knew.

She was now alone. She'd lost everything.

Her home. Her belongings. Dear God, her mother.

She'd never known her father. She had no brothers or sisters. Her grandmother, who lived with them above the 9th Street bread shop, died two years ago. There was no life insurance. No property insurance.

There was only Rocky, who escaped when neighbors tried to enter the building to save the woman known by the English translation of her name: Sunday.

And there's the small miracle of the jewelry box.

It had been sitting on Debbie's dresser. The dresser, and everything else in the house, was destroyed in the two-alarm fire.

The jewelry box - made of wood and filled with family mementos - inexplicably survived.

Sunday Lombardo certainly had her flaws and troubles.

She struggled to run the family business - the House of Bread, at 935 S. 9th St. - after her parents died. She struggled to pay the bills on the three-story property with the upstairs apartment where she and Debbie lived.

Sometimes, she couldn't even pay for the bread.

But somehow she found the $5,000 tuition for Debbie to attend Ss. John Neumann and Maria Goretti Catholic High School - and for everything else Debbie needed.

"Every word out of her mouth was 'Debbie,' " said Nancy DePasquale, a cousin.

When Debbie recently got a high score on a math test, Sunday ran into a nearby store owned by her best friend, waving the test and yelling, "Debbie got a 97 on her math test!"

"Everybody on the street knew about it," said shopkeeper Elie Klitsch with a melancholy smile.

Sunday insisted on walking Debbie partway to school every morning so they could talk.

"I was embarrassed," Debbie said, sitting in Klitsch's store with a handful of relatives and friends of her mother's.

"I'm in high school. Parents don't walk to the school no more."

If Sunday was protective of her daughter to a fault, it was probably because of her other Debbie, a sister who died at 18 of a rare illness.

"She never got over that," said Sunday's brother, retired Philadelphia Police Officer Frank Lombardo.

Sunday named Debbie after her sister.

Her sister's initial ring was in the jewelry box.

Debbie sits on the floor and opens the wooden box, which reeks of smoke.

Inside is Debbie's grandfather's gold watch. A cross her grandmother gave her for communion. Her mother's communion ring. A necklace with an Eeyore charm - the donkey from Winnie the Pooh - that Sunday bought at Disney World for Debbie when she was 5. A few other pieces of her mother's jewelry.

It's all she has left.

It was midafternoon on Wednesday, Debbie would be home from school soon, and Sunday went upstairs to make chicken cutlets.

"She always had food on the table when I came home," Debbie said.

Presumably Sunday walked away from the frying pan for a few moments.

The grease caught fire, spread quickly to the kitchen cabinets, and enveloped the living quarters in dense, black smoke.

"It's not like the movies; it's pitch-black and you can't see a thing," said Fire Commissioner Ayers.

"All you feel is heat and smoke and it's choking. Two breathfuls of that and you're done."

Sunday Lombardo, 50, was found on a stairwell landing.

"My heart stopped," Debbie said of the moment she was told.

"I just went nuts. I ran outside screaming, 'She's gone!' I couldn't believe it. I still don't believe it."

For now, Debbie is staying with a girlfriend whose mother was a close friend of Sunday's. She doesn't know where she'll live for good.

"I'm kind of confused about that right now," she said.

"That's too much to think about."

Probably Debbie will live with her Uncle Frank. And a longtime wish will tragically be fulfilled.

"I hated living on top of the store. I just wanted to be normal," she said. "I was always known as the girl who lives on top of the bread store.

"I didn't like it. But now it's kind of weird not being there. It was my whole life.

"But I don't care about the house. I just want my mom." *

A trust fund has been set up in Debbie's name. Please send donations, made out to Debbie Lombardo, to Jill Porter at the Daily News, 400 N. Broad St., Phila., Pa. 19130.