Chapter 25 #3
I directed the truck, signed the receipt, and wrote the surcharge into the first-year budget while the driver was still strapping his empties. It came in under the small-delivery option and well over Brenda’s assumption. Eleven hundred a month through March.
In the office I crossed out the accountant’s figure and wrote mine over it. “The route costs forty-four hundred more than your page says, and the equipment service comes due in April. The price comes down four thousand, or the note goes to seventy-one with the down payment where it is.”
Brenda hung her coat on the back of the door and read the line I had changed. “No.”
I waited. Twenty-six years of not decorating anything meant she did not fill the pause for me.
“One hundred ten. Thirty-five down. Seventy-five over seven years at the rate on page two,” she said. “That’s what I retire on. A bridge that opens again in March is your first year, not my business.”
“You told me you’d rather sell to me.”
“I would. I’m not paying for the privilege.
” She sat down. “Here’s what I’ll do. I stay six months instead of three, on the floor, unpaid, and you can hand me the four o’clock and go home to sleep.
First note payment deferred ninety days.
The mixer’s mine under the letter — I repair it or replace it before closing, at my cost. That’s the ground I’ve got. The price isn’t ground.”
Six months of Brenda is worth more than four thousand dollars and cannot be spent on flour in February.
I knew that sitting in the chair. I took it anyway, because I wanted that room — the bins, the shimmed mixer, the warm shelf, the back door that needs a hip — more than I wanted to be the one who moved her.
Nobody had told me no in months. Everyone around me had spent the autumn handing me choices with both hands until it started to feel like weather.
Brenda said no across a desk with a coat hook behind her head, and it cost me four thousand dollars.
“Write it down,” I said.
“I already did.” She turned the page over. It was on the back.
June made me put my own wage back into the projection that night after I tried to zero it out for the first six months.
“If the business can’t pay you, it can’t afford you,” she said, rotating the laptop. “You’re not buying yourself another place where everybody gets paid except the woman fixing it.”
“It’s six months.”
“The down payment leaves forty-four thousand between the returned savings and Beth’s money. Twenty-nine is the business reserve, fifteen is yours, and I’m underlining the fifteen.” She entered the wage herself. “Neither one gets replaced by Ryder when a compressor dies.”
Due diligence took the next two weeks and produced nothing dramatic, which is what due diligence is for.
Three years of returns, payroll, vendor terms, open orders, service records with serial numbers, the lease redrafted twice, the name searched for liens and clean.
The inspection put the small mixer at a seal and a bearing, and Brenda covered it because she had already written it on the back of a page.
The letter of intent came to the bakery office on the nineteenth, in the afternoon, ovens down, the building ticking as it cooled.
Brenda cleared the desk by moving the calendars and the order slips onto a chair.
Two pages, and a third listing what remained to be verified.
I read it twice with my coat still on. My right to withdraw after taxes, payroll, equipment, inspection, lease and vendor contracts.
My house securing nothing. One clause, four lines long, saying no marital or club interest existed or would be permitted to exist, with my husband’s name in it once.
There was flour in the creases of my knuckles, the way there has been since I was seventeen.
I signed under the fold. My hand shook on the E and steadied by the end, and the ink sat up wet on cheap paper for a second before it took.
Brenda countersigned without reading it again, put the original in my hands, and kept the copy.
“That’s the easy one,” she said. “Closing takes longer and hurts more.”
“I know.”
“You don’t yet.” She picked her coat off the door. “Lock the back on your way out. It wants your hip.”
I drove the sixteen miles home with the folder on the seat where a person would sit.
Ryder was crossing the yard with a tray of cleaned tools when I got out.
He saw the folder and stopped far enough away that congratulating me would have needed permission.
I held the first page up so he could read it through the cover.
“I signed the letter of intent,” I said. “The route information helped.”
For a second he looked the way he used to when I came through our door with a plan. Then he put it away, on his side of the yard.
“Congratulations, Eden.”
“You may congratulate me from over there.” I put the folder against my chest. “That side.”
He stayed where I put him. I went inside and hung my coat on the hook by the door, and the whole downstairs filled with the smell of that building — hot metal, yeast, the orange cleaner they use on the counters — coming off the wool in a warm room.