Chapter 19: The Mill

It was like Lily, Bruce, and I were on a honeymoon. Not that we had sex all the time. But we had good sex. Satisfying. Sometimes dreamy. Yeah. But not all the time.

The thing was that we were good with each other. Once I got my head out of my ass and wasn’t obsessing about selling condos or school or childrearing, I allowed myself to become fully a member of our family. We still had little arguments. Every family has its little ups and downs, as they say. But we worked it out. It became more and more obvious every day that we loved each other.

And I stopped obsessing over whether I was the one who was giving the most support to Emily. In my first life, my Willa had one loving parent and two possessive grandmothers who mostly tried to keep her away from me. Until Mom died. Somehow, Jesse’s mom seemed to back off then, too. Maybe it was my mother she was competing with and not me. Regardless, Emily had three loving, doting parents.

By her third birthday, Emily was calling both Lily and me ‘mommy’ and Bruce ‘daddy.’

“Why don’t you join us?” Carla asked Lily at our annual holiday party. It was big enough now that I actually hired a caterer to serve the food so I could just enjoy the party. When Carla had broached the subject of her women’s retreat to discuss making Minneapolis more friendly toward women in business, I shrugged. I’d never thought of myself as a woman in business. I had a project and I went out and sold it. I’d joined the National Realtor’s Association, but that was the only organization I belonged to, even now that I had my broker’s license. “Certainly with as much time as you spend guiding students, you’ve heard some things and come up with some ideas,” Carla pressed. “I could really use you.”

“What do you think?” Lily asked as we snuggled in bed after the party.

“I think Carla could really use you,” Bruce laughed. “And if you played your cards right you could use her, too.” Lily moaned. I had to laugh. I wasn’t interested in playing, but there was certainly an undertone of Carla wanting to play with Lily. She’d accepted my excuse with no attempt to convince me otherwise.

“Three days at a resort in Brainerd with a roomful of pussy,” I whispered in Lily’s ear. “How can you say no?”

“I can say no because I have two wonderful lovers cuddling naked against me who I love more than life itself. I can say no ... if I don’t go. I don’t know that I could say no if Carla happened to wander into my room late one night after I’d had a couple of drinks.”

“So don’t,” I said. “I doubt if Bruce could say no if she wandered into his room late one night after he’d had a couple of drinks.”

“I’d try,” he said, “but ... damn!”

“Are you two giving me permission to mess around with Carla if the opportunity presented herself on this retreat?” Lily asked.

“Only if you describe what happens in lurid detail when you come home,” Bruce said. “I might have to have a smoke afterward.”

“You smoke and you’ll be living in your office,” I said. Bruce didn’t smoke, but I didn’t get that he was making a joke until after I’d sounded like a cat.

“You’d rather have me smelling of someone else’s pussy than Bruce smelling of smoke?” Lily asked.

“I think I’d wash your face before I kissed you,” I said. “Tell you what, Bruce. If the story is that good, I’ll join you for the smoke. And in your office afterward.” Eventually, Lily agreed to go, with our blessing.

The infrastructure in the Mill was all in by the first of the year. I left all the details of our current condo sales in Renata’s capable hands and turned all my efforts to the Mill. I hired a staff for the sales office and we started tours and presales. My goal was to have a hundred solid prospects in the pipeline before we actually opened sales with the first unit in June. In the meantime, we also had to line up tenants for the first floor businesses.

I was in sales again, but in a completely different venue.

“I just don’t think there is a large enough market for a Byerly’s on Main Street,” their development vice president said after I’d made my presentation. He’d jumped to the conclusion I predicted before I even finished the presentation.

“I completely agree,” I said.

“Then why are we meeting?”

“With its acquisition of Lund’s, Byerly’s has a corner on the high-end market. But your current stores, aside from the original Lund’s in Uptown, are playing to middle class suburbia. You are talking about—I’m sorry to use the stereotype—hockey moms who have to rush home and feed the family. Your stock in your suburban markets has an 80% overlap with Rainbow Foods. An article in the Star-Trib last year suggested that there was really no difference between your fresh produce, butcher shop, and delicatessen and that of your cheaper competitor. What we have at the Mill is a real opportunity for you to grab the top-end market again,” I said.

“How do you propose we do that?”

“The Mill will attract young upwardly mobile professionals,” I said. “Yuppies. They have good money and know they need to invest it soundly, so they are looking for a home they can buy without having to spend every weekend cutting the grass. But added to that, we have the newer class, Dinks—Dual Income, No Kids. Yuppies fall in love and get married. The average age for having children, though, is going up. They still want their freedom and their lifestyle. Those people don’t want to stop at 7-Eleven and pick up a can of Campbell’s soup for seventy-nine cents. They want to stop at the Byerly Deli and pay six dollars for a container of their favorite, fresh, hot minestrone. When they cook, they don’t even want to compare the meats to see which is the grass-fed Black Angus. They want to assume that the vegetables they buy are organic. They want the best that Byerly’s and Lunds can offer without sorting through coupons to see which tampons are on sale.”

“You make that sound so exclusionary and classist.”

“It’s the way we are selling the condos. Our buyers very much are classist.”

I left Byerly’s Corporate with another appointment and the assignment of bringing back a concept drawing of what I envisioned the shopping area to look like.

“Bruce? Honey?” I said, sidling up to him after dinner. I liked the fact that unless it was tech week or production, he didn’t have to be at the theater in the evenings. I perched in his lap in front of the TV while Lily played with Emily. He turned the TV off. Smart boy.

“Mmm. What is it, lover? Do I smell the fresh scent of an aroused woman in my lap?” he asked, taking a deep breath.

“I think that’s my soap. But I’m a clean woman sitting in your lap.” We kissed. Mmm. I almost forgot what I wanted. “Could you do a couple quick little drawings for me? Well, maybe more like renderings? As if you were designing a stage set?”

“Ah, so you do want something besides sex.”

“No. I want something in addition to sex. I don’t want a substitute.”