115: The Proposition

I went into my office Monday morning after feeding all fourteen kids breakfast and leading their forms. I got them to our classroom above the studio and turned them over to Cassie. All of those things made my head swim and I plopped in my desk chair and stared at the wall filled with pictures of the kids and families in the village.

Fourteen kids. Of course, that included Melanie and Stephanie. Technically, they weren’t part of our clan, but there was no question that they’d be adopted into our tribe at Christmas. Sly and Lily had actually mentioned the possibility of adopting the girls officially instead of just being their legal guardians. They were going slow on that since they didn’t want to cut the girls’ mother out of their lives completely. Laura Dennis had visited over the weekend to celebrate Stephanie’s eleventh birthday and seemed happy with the way her kids were being treated.

The fourteen, though, didn’t include the eight who were under the age of two. Or Lionel’s four. Or the two in the hopper. Our little clan with twenty-eight children. When we wrote the agreement fourteen years ago, none of us would have dreamed of this day. I certainly couldn’t have imagined fathering six or eight of them. None of us were sure about the last two, though I suspected Cassie’s daughter, Ruth, might have my genes. The picture I had of her on my desk looked an awful lot like one I’d seen of Betts in our family album.

The kids all liked having breakfast together early in the morning. It had become a village tradition, even though we’d slipped the time back to five-thirty instead of four-thirty. We figured an hour cooking, talking, and cleaning up. Then we had an hour of forms. Larry and Carl had put heat in the Silo two years ago when the kids were finishing forms with their teeth chattering in the middle of winter. Not that we kept it really warm, but it wasn’t freezing. As soon as we were finished with forms, the kids scattered to their homes with a few of the moms escorting the littlest ones home to get washed and dressed for school. I’d once again meet all the kids at the studio door and get them upstairs for school before Rees started taping her show at eight-thirty. We’d closed off an entryway to the studio so the kids could come in and go upstairs without disturbing the taping. We should have done it years ago instead of hanging curtains. It gave us a space to greet audience members and hang coats, as well.

The entire loft of the old barn was now referred to as the Corazón Academy. Cassie was the principal teacher for the first and second graders. In addition to Ellie and Matthew, three other children had enrolled in the Academy this fall. I thought it was pretty pretentious to call our little private school an academy, but Rose said it helped in terms of marketing the school which would be necessary in order to serve the needs of the community. Three of our kids and three more from the surrounding area were enrolled in our kindergarten. Renee was filling in as the kindergarten teacher while she built an academic plan for the school. Having her credentials on our profile helped establish us as well. I had a feeling that we might be hiring a teacher when our three preschoolers joined the class next year. When we talked to parents about having their children attend the academy, we had to explain that things weren’t like your typical school. We had a separate room for the nursery so the babies could either sleep or make noise without disturbing or being disturbed. Aside from that, the preschool, kindergarten, and elementary kids were all in a large room together with separate activities going on for each. Occasionally a kindergartener would join the first and second grade kids when something interested her or play in a corner with a preschooler if it didn’t. We figured kids would learn at their own pace as we provided the activities and guidance to encourage them.

And then there was this whole thing about going to my office. After the little ones were in school, Stephanie had caught her bus to the township elementary school, and Melanie had gone off for her day’s work with Rhonda, I went to the village and climbed to my second floor office. We were getting crowded. Leonard and his staff were occupying the third floor and they were getting crowded, too. Courtney’s engineers were working out of a storefront in Bloomington. We were going to be constructing a new office building next door to Designed by Leonard.

After working with the kids early in the morning, it took me a few minutes to shift gears into my corporate mode. I was executive producer for Hearthstone Entertainment. Rhonda had dropped that from her titles and was focused entirely on directing the new miniseries. Rose was CEO and in the office next to mine. She gets the corner office, I chuckled to myself. Only she was often in her office an hour or more before I got to mine, or was in Indianapolis at the CEN office. At nine-fifteen, like every morning, I was drawn from my thoughts and reverie by Rebecca standing in my doorway with a fresh cup of coffee.

“I’m ready,” I said. I moved to our little conference table and we sat opposite each other. When I quit XX/XY, Rebecca was concerned that I would no longer need an assistant. However, I was still being scheduled frequently as a guest speaker for schools, and surprisingly as a motivational speaker at some conferences. Even though they weren’t telecast, I was being invited to speak at various sororities and fraternities or to MC special events. We’d added assisting Rose to Rebecca’s job description as well and she was kept plenty busy keeping tabs and scheduling the two of us.

“Here’s today’s run-down,” she began. “Even though her mother was here for a celebration yesterday, you are expected for dinner with the Cortales family tonight to celebrate Stephanie’s birthday. I believe there will be one or two other eleven-year-olds joining the dinner, as well as Rhonda and Samantha, of course.”

“Of course,” I said with a smile. The Cortales house was fairly bursting. Instead of occupying the second master suite as they originally had, Melanie and Stephanie had moved into the side-by-side guest rooms with a shared Jack-and-Jill bath between them. Both girls liked the increased privacy of their own rooms and Rhonda and Samantha liked the fact they had the master suite to escape to. Especially if they could drag me along with them.

“You are speaking at the Franklin Rotary luncheon this noon, so you’ll need to leave here by eleven o’clock. Courtney is planning to join you and should be here in plenty of time. You need to spend a little extra time with her this afternoon. I think she’s becoming clingy as she approaches her third trimester. It’s not unusual. Just go with the flow and show her you love her,” Rebecca said. She had become as much a counselor for my love life as for my business life. I think, in fact, that she enjoyed that part of her job most.

“Is she really that far?” I said, counting on my fingers.

“No. Courtney is going to milk being pregnant for everything she’s worth. By the time she delivers, I’m sure she’ll have been pregnant for at least eighteen months.” Rebecca laughed. “That’s it on the calendar for today. Don’t forget that you and Rose are meeting with Armand Lockhurst tomorrow morning at ten-thirty. As it happens, I need to spend some time at the CEN studio tomorrow going over the administrative details of the currently running shows.”

“That’s part of your job?”

“Who do you think gives you the comprehensive status reports each month, Mr. Executive Producer?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Besides, I will conveniently be just down the hall should you or Rose happen to need anything during the meeting. Or immediately afterward. You won’t have to call home to reach me,” Rebecca said.

“You are such a treasure. What would I do without you?” I asked.

“Don’t get sappy. I am not going to run around naked in front of one of your family bonfires.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it!”

“Yes, you would. Now. Let’s get to the part of this meeting you are actually interested in.”

“Are the designs finished?” I asked.

“Rachel only needed the final specs on the ovens. Ron is going over the bid estimates as we speak. If you are really committed to this, he says you should have a functional bakery by mid-May.”

“Yeah!” I clapped my hands. This was going to be completely different. I’d talked to Dani and her sisters, to Rose and my casa, and to the production group at Hearthstone Entertainment. It affected, somewhat, the parents of all the kids, as well. It wasn’t going to be a huge operation. I anticipated that everything I produced would be consumed in the village. I would supply bread and some specialties for the Heartthrob Café. I would sell bread to the village and anything I had left over when I closed shop would go into Maribelle’s little grocery. I planned to be finished in the bakery each morning in time to be in my office by nine, as usual.

The biggest problem would be changing my schedule with the kids, but I had some plans for that, too.

My own bakery with gas fired brick ovens for artisan bread.

“Brian and Rose, we’ve been working together for five years now. I think it has been pretty successful. You’ve done ground-breaking work and after viewing the rushes for the new miniseries, I think we have a lot of success cooked up going forward,” Armand said. It was true and we were all making gobs of money right now. Chick Chat still dominated the afternoon cable ratings and XX/XY was rapidly gaining ground on the other evening talk shows. Lee was good for it.

“I have to agree, sir,” I said. “We’ve been very happy with our relationship.”

“It’s all we can do to keep up with the growth,” Rose agreed. “We’re looking at hiring several new production staff people.”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about. You started out as a family-owned and operated business. Your biggest stars are part of your clan. Now you are beginning to branch out with Lee on XX/XY, Livy taking over for Amber on her comedy tour, and the new actors for the miniseries. You’ve got a producer and a couple directors who are not part of your extended family. In short, you are still family-owned, but your employees are no longer mostly your family,” he said. “And we are duplicating efforts in some areas between Hearthstone and CEN.”

“That’s true,” Rose said hesitantly. “We treat them like family, though.”

“As well you should. They are going to be critical ingredients to your future success. It might interest you to know that is pretty much the way I started out, too,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I was a radio broadcaster and ended up buying the little station I was working at from my uncle. With a little help from the family. My wife and I did half the broadcasting for the company and various cousins did the rest. My kids swept the floors and emptied the wastebaskets. It was a great time.”

“Are they all still involved?” I asked.

“No. I’m sorry to say they are gone. I have a son in a nursing home. When his mother died, I simply couldn’t care for him by myself. His brother was killed in Viet Nam. I sank myself into acquiring a media empire and working. Well, three radio stations, two TV stations, three newspapers, and a tabloid wasn’t much of an empire, but it made me a wealthy man. I decided to start a cable network and, through your influence, a magazine that would counteract the damage that was being done by my tabloid.” He drank some coffee, but I wasn’t sure how this was relevant to us. “It was because it was just me and I had no family left that we got to the unfortunate situation that brought us together. I was acquiring properties and managing money, but I wasn’t paying attention to the content being generated in my media outlets. When I saw what had occurred in the Star, which I had paid no attention to since acquiring it other than to check the bottom line and make sure it was being profitable, I realized that I was no longer the starry-eyed idealist that I’d been when I started. I had let go of something that you had in spades. Passion for what was good. When I made you stockholders, granted of a very small percentage, in Lockhurst Media as a result of your suit, you became the only minority shareholders.

“I thought there were other partners in the holding company,” I said.

“Three businesses own the holding company. I own all three of them,” he sighed. “You might have noticed a couple more sizable payments coming into your accounts this month. There will be more over the next few months as I divest most of the properties. I think I’ll keep the Star and XX/XY Woman/Man magazine.”

“What about CEN?” Rose asked. That was what this was about. Armand was going to sell CEN.

“I think we should spin CEN off as a separate company and merge it with Hearthstone Entertainment.”

What the fuck? He wants our business, too?

“I don’t think we’re interested in selling,” I said. Rose scowled at me and I realized I’d jumped in too quickly. She was CEO, after all.

“I didn’t say sell, I said merge. I have a basic proposal put together that I’d like you to take to your business associates and lawyers. I’ll give you the skinny. In return for relinquishing your shares of Lockhurst Media, which will have only two other properties when we close this deal, you will receive a forty-five percent interest in the merged CEN/Hearthstone corporation.”

“Forty-five percent so that you retain a fifty-five percent majority,” Rose sighed.

“Not exactly. I’ve also proposed to sell outright ten percent of the new corporation to James Engineering. I understand that Ms. James is part of your family, and that would give you the combined fifty-five percent majority. She, however, will have to pay for her own share,” he said.

“How does that benefit Courtney?” I asked. She wasn’t there to answer for herself and I wondered if she had any idea that she would be offered a share of the network.

“I believe we are poised to offer a variety of Internet programming in the near future. She already bought that game company up in Minnesota. The dating site is a positive part of the deal. The same is true of your new cooking show. Traffic to the main network website is being driven by hits from your show. Fifty percent of Ms. James’s buy-in would be her Internet business. We would not acquire any other James Engineering properties and she would continue to develop her video editing suite and any other computer software she desired,” Armand said.