The Usual Family Mayhem

Chapter One

I needed a good idea. Not an interesting one or one with potential. Nope. This had to be a real stunner. The kind that would cause the men sitting around the conference room table in their plain white, nine-hundred-dollar Tom Ford sneakers to break out in a chorus of oohhs and aahhhs.

Hell, I’d settle for tepid approval and a few half-hearted nods at this point.

Living in Washington, DC, and being single meant wading through a dreary dating pool of guys in striped ties. I didn’t have a problem with stripes, in general, but these stripes tended to be worn by a specific clout-chasing Capitol Hill type. This clout-chasing Capitol Hill type asked the same two questions at the start of every date: Where do you work? and Where did you go to college?

Being twenty-six and no longer actually in college, I didn’t understand why the latter mattered but College of Charleston. Go Cougars! The answer to the former was Nexus Opportunity Ideas. I’d worked there for four months and three days and still had no idea what I did for a living other than sit at my desk and play games on my phone.

NOI was a business incubator that found and developed business opportunities for savvy investors. The description came right from the company website. I know because I memorized it and repeated it with confidence whenever anyone asked me about my job. The explanation was only slightly more comprehensible than the company name, which sounded like pure gibberish.

My best friend, Whitney, worked in human resources at NOI. She’d texted, emailed, and called me about an open position the second before the official listing went live to give me the chance to “get in fast.”

Yeah, no pressure.

Whitney made enough money to buy a sweet one-bedroom two blocks from Logan Circle. Sure, it barely measured six hundred square feet, but it had a private terrace and a walk-in closet. I rented a studio apartment on the fourth floor of an in-need-of-renovating building with a leaky faucet, wallet-depleting rent, and a broken elevator.

Whitney easily won that round of adult bingo.

If only to rescue my ego and bank account from obliteration, I needed to survive the six-month probationary period at NOI. Two months to go.

The position sounded great in the employment listing. Talk about false advertising. Dynamic work environment! Innovative teams! Breakfast and lunch provided! The promise of a daily free bagel won me over. But to get the job I had to . . . let’s say embellish.

Lie. I had to lie.

The job requirements were vague, or I pretended they were. Business or finance degree? Not really or at all. The ability to quickly and effectively develop new investment opportunities and strategize about their implementation and financing? No idea what that even meant. But Whitney vouched for me, and I owed her big-time.

One problem remained. I hadn’t pitched a single actionable idea since starting at NOI. I kept my head down, made calls, attended meetings, and researched other people’s projects. Basically, a computer program could do my job and no one would need to feed it a free bagel, so my days were numbered. I had to start doing something or get better at faking being busy.

“Kasey?”

Kasey Nottingham. That was me. Unfortunately. I stopped staring out the window at The Wharf, the strip of restaurants, businesses, and residences on DC’s southwest waterfront where NOI was located.

That location being the best part of the job. Food everywhere and if I squinted I could see the tail end of the National Cherry Blossom Festival from the smaller conference room.

A perk the company recited with pride at the initial interview back in November, months before the cherry blossoms appeared.

This town took its flower festivals very seriously.

Brock Deavers had called for my attention and now he had it. He managed to be the most annoying I went to Yale blowhard I’d ever met and that was a high bar to clear. He was my immediate boss. I’d been foisted on him without his input and clearly over his objection, and now worked on his team. Lucky me.

That team consisted of other guys who went to Yale or Yale-like schools. They played around in canoes or kayaks—not sure about the difference—on the weekends as they traded stories about their college rowing days. Never mind that they were in their thirties. In Brock’s case forties but pretending to be thirties.

At CofC we called these guys assholes.

Every member of the five-person team was an assistant director because this company handed out titles like free bagels, but Brock was a full-fledged director. The guy in charge. Dressed to perfection in his expensive-but-trying-to-look-casual black pants and zip-up hoodie.

He hated me. He never said the actual words out loud, but he telegraphed his disdain at every opportunity. He sighed whenever I opened my mouth. He trampled over the few comments I rarely offered. He’d also delivered a lecture yesterday about my workload that should have lasted five minutes max but droned on for forty.

His smirk now shouted gotcha! “You wanted to talk about a business idea today?”

Ah, okay. We’d entered the passive-aggressive portion of the meeting. This was a challenge. Brock’s way of testing. Worse, of showing everyone I didn’t belong in this super-dynamic and not-at-all self-important company.

He wasn’t totally wrong but still. Screw him.

The charged silence dragged on just long enough for people to start shifting around in their leather chairs. If they thought they were uncomfortable they should have tried being me.

“Pies.”

The word popped out of my mouth to a round of frowns. Some guys in the room leaned forward in what looked like the body language equivalent of what the hell did she say?

The most pronounced scowl belonged to Michael Bainbridge, the owner of NOI. The same Michael who had some sort of epiphany or spiritual awakening and now insisted on being called Micah. Because it was totally normal to change your name if you thought a different one sounded cooler. His parents must be so proud.

Fifty and trim, Micah ran more miles each day than I had in my entire life. He’d also taken a class on effective listening and spent the majority of every conversation repeating back whatever anyone said in the form of a question.

“Pies?”

Micah asked, right on cue. His eyes narrowed behind his black-framed, very serious glasses that matched his newly minted name. “Are you hungry?”

Yes. Always. Wasn’t everyone? But this was the time for babbling, not eating. Full-on, cover-your-ass, try-to-make-sense babbling. “Food is big business.”

Micah nodded. His version of encouragement. That and the repeating thing. “Big business?”

Brock sat up, clearly intending to interrupt. His shifting made my brain spin faster, spewing words about the one business model I knew a little about. Very little. Like, almost nothing. “Imagine homemade desserts, with pies being the star, made by two older Southern women using time-honored family recipes that elicit a feeling of nostalgia and luxury.”

Brock snorted as he shook his head. “Food is a crowded field. There’s no way—”

Micah held up a hand. “Let her finish.”

Yeah, dumbass. Let me finish.

“This is about more than pies and desserts. It’s about the story behind the desserts.”

I was in it now and didn’t have a road map to lead me out again. “The backstory is inspiring. Two women of a certain age were married to completely useless men and ultimately forced to fend for themselves.”

I let that last sentence splash around in the room’s testosterone for a second.

“They rebuilt their lives by making and selling pies. Creating a business and a community around the pies that later expanded to include other desserts.”

“So?”

Brock excelled at missing the point and didn’t disappoint here.

“Frankly, they’re damn good pies. Right now, they’re sold on a small scale all over the South via word of mouth and a website. They’re special. Curated. Artisanal.”

I’d moved into the part of the pitch where I threw phrases together that may or may not have applied to pies, cupcakes, and other assorted dessert items because this room loved fancy buzzwords. “Now imagine taking this small grandma-run business nationwide. Making it the go-to dessert option for special occasions. Putting it in high-end grocery and specialty stores as well as on direct delivery. Creating demand like that lady did with cupcakes a decade or so ago.”

Big fan. Loved the whole dessert family. And those cupcake vending machines? Genius.

Now I wanted a cupcake, so time to wrap this up. “If we focus on the pies for a second, once you convince people they need the pies, they’ll pay anything for those pies. Plus, you have built-in marketing gold in the form of two very feisty, self-made women who people will see as their grandmas.”

There. Done. Not brilliant but not a complete fumble either.

No one said a word.

Maybe I didn’t stick the landing. The pitch wasn’t real anyway. I counted on it getting shot down. The hope was to buy a few more months on the job while I figured out how to do it.

“The scale is too small,”

Brock said.

Micah frowned. “Too small?”

“Yes?”

Brock looked a bit less confident about his attempt at sabotage than he had a minute ago.

“Everyone has a grandma.”

Micah made the statement as if he was delivering a grand revelation and not merely commenting on a biological fact. “Combined with the reality that people with money are willing to pay for items they’re convinced are luxuries, something special their neighbors don’t have, even though anyone could buy or make that item for far less, you have a recipe for success.”

Like how the sneakers I got on sale for fifteen dollars looked a lot like Brock’s expensive ones. Just as an example.

Micah continued. “Our job is to convince an investor who already has a foothold in the specialty food market that they can make these pies, produce them at a substantial return, and create sustainable demand.”

Wait . . . did he say . . . Was Micah actually considering this?

He shrugged. “Then our client can sell the entire company, grandmas and all, for a huge profit to some big grocery chain.”

Selling grandmas sounded like a problem, but I played along because Brock looked ready to explode into a giant fireball of ego and hair gel. I didn’t want to miss that.

“We can start making calls and testing interest levels. First thing we’ll need to do is secure our rights and get these grandmas under contract.”

Micah pointed the end of his pen at me. “You have two weeks.”

Huh . . . Well, that went sideways fast. The extent of my overpromising hit with the force of a freight train.

My grandmother was going to kill me.