Chapter 17A

After that one time with Helen, I decided that I was just too busy to be trying to maintain any kind of social life. I had my family, including Joyce, I had school, and I had the boys in the group homes. I told myself there simply wasn't enough time to have friends, not in addition to everything else I was committed to doing. The sex hadn't been that satisfying to me, and I had to admit that I just wasn't ready to move on with that part of my life.

I had spoken with Grace shortly after my meeting with Marie. At first, she was very skeptical about being able to run a restaurant. She hadn't even worked in one. She knew nothing, she said. I told her I knew nothing about it either, and all of us would learn about it together.

Right from the beginning, Jane was enthusiastic in her support for the idea. She knew that Grace had planned on not registering for the upcoming fall semester, and she was worried that Grace might decide to leave, returning to her family in Topeka, if she didn't find something she could do that would allow her to stay there in Bolling with Jane.

I told them the first thing to do would be to find a building to lease, preferably one that had already been a restaurant. I had a list I'd gotten from my father, where he'd given a ball park estimate of costs for starting up a restaurant, based on what I'd told him of the kinds of foods that Marie wanted to cook. One thing he'd emphasized, over all of the other things, was the importance of a good location.

It was his contention, that people failed in the restaurant business because they had either picked a poor location, or they didn't have enough financial reserves to stick with it, until the restaurant started turning a profit. He also told me that restaurants failed because they didn't have a clear idea of what kind of eating place they wanted to be. Lastly, he told me that even if we managed to avoid all those other pitfalls, we could still fail, if we didn't have the food or the ambiance that would draw in repeat customers, ones who would be willing to return to us, over and over again. He didn't make it seem like an easy investment to make a success of.

Hans told me that he knew someone, (a German friend of his) who was a dealer in used restaurant supplies, over in Kansas City, Missouri. He told us that buying used equipment made a lot more sense than buying new. So many restaurants failed, that there was a huge supply of nearly new kitchen equipment offered for resale. His friend could save us a lot of money on the start up costs of outfitting our kitchen. Like all of our other businesses, this was to be a family venture, right from the very beginning. Once I told them my idea, and who I wanted to help, all of them were behind me, one hundred per cent.

We found a building almost by accident. One of Dad's bankers was complaining about a big loan that had gone sour on him. It had gone bad because, the company in default, had gotten themselves over-leveraged, and they couldn't keep up with the debt service, having spent too much of their capital in making even more dubious acquisitions. The banker was complaining because he felt the defaulting borrowers had grossly overstated the values of the assets they had pledged for most of their loans. At the time of foreclosure, the vacancy rate on all of the underlying income producing assets had been close to fifty per cent. There wasn't enough income being generated to keep the accounts current. My father, being always on the lookout for an opportunity, asked for, and was given, a summary of the bank's repossessed portfolio.

Joyce was asked to find someone to investigate, and to then give us a current market appraisal for all of the properties. Mama and Uncle Bunny had always been interested in any good income properties to be found with either attractive pricing or favorable terms. The report that came back didn't reveal any outstanding values, but Dad knew the banker wanted to convert his non performing loans back into performing ones. Interest rates were still coming down, and, Dad felt that he might be able to convert all the loans at a very favorable interest rate.

In the end, it turned out that the bank was willing to finance one hundred per cent for us, of a two point seven million dollar loan, at two percentage points under the prime interest rate. They agreed to do this as long as they didn't have to charge back any principal, by writing down the loan balance amount owed to them at the time of default. Basically, it was to be an interest rate play on my mother's part. She was gambling that the properties would appreciate in value at a greater rate than the interest and the taxes she paid for the properties. Dad's investigator believed that normal occupancy rates should have been much higher, and that lease terms were too low based on current market comparable lease rates. His conclusion was that the properties had been poorly managed, and should have yielded more than enough to carry their old debt service.

Two of the properties were vacant restaurants. One was too large for what I was looking for Grace and Marie to get started with, but the other one was three thousand square feet, and on the first floor of a five story professional office building. The previous tenant had moved out when their lease expired, wanting to build their own, larger location, closer to a main highway artery. From what information we had, they had been profitable in their old location, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, mostly to downtown workers and shoppers.

Mama leased the whole building to a corporation we had formed, and I brought Marie and Grace together for a first meeting. It was early August, and Marie had finished up at St. Cecelia's. We showed both girls our proposed location, explaining to them that the corporation was going to lease them a fully turn key operation, just as soon as they were ready to open up for business. This meant the corporation would underwrite all costs for equipment and decorations, meaning Marie and Grace wouldn't have any money at all invested in the restaurant.

It was agreed that each would be paid three hundred dollars a week for the first year, and, then, another meeting would take place at the end of the first year to see where everything stood, as far as generated income exceeding costs and expenses. Mama assured both women that they wouldn't be responsible for any losses incurred in that first year of operation. Marie and Grace would split any profits over and above a reasonable return on the corporation's capital investment.

Marie would be in charge of everything in the kitchen, including the menu, and Grace would handle everything out in the dining area, including restaurant receipts, payroll and bookkeeping. She would also be taking care of all the staffing of the non-kitchen workers and the dining room staff. It took no time at all for both women to agree to try it under the terms that Mama proposed. I knew that this salary was more than Marie had been making at St. Cecelia's, even though she had worked there for a number of years. Grace seemed to be more confident, knowing that Mama was involved in the restaurant project.

Marie accompanied Gerta and Hans down to Kansas City, looking over the used restaurant equipment from Hans' German friend. Even with buying everything at well more than a sixty per cent discount from it's original list price, Marie spent more than twenty thousand dollars, just on kitchen equipment. At Mama's insistence, Marie was put on salary right away, and Grace would begin drawing hers, just as soon as her counselor/teacher duties at the golf academy were finished, sometime in the first week of September. Mama gave Grace the names and contact information for a firm that specialized in consulting on the decorating of themed restaurants. Mama wanted to call the new restaurant "Gracarie" combining the two names of the women. They discussed that, and then settled on "Gracarie's Cocina" It was going to be a Cuban/Mexican restaurant. Marie's husband was originally from Cuba, and Marie's parents had brought her from Mexico when she was in her teens.

I hadn't heard from Shirley since before mid July. I wasn't too surprised though, when I received a call from her on a Tuesday evening in October, less than a week after my date with Helen. As soon as Helen told me she was planning on telling Ellen stories about our date, I assumed that Ellen might want to call, and pass them on to Shirley. The surprise was not that Shirley had found out about about my date with Helen, but rather that she had called to discuss it with me.

"Kenny, this is Shirley."

"Hello Shirley. I'm glad you called. How are things with you?"

"Ellen called me. She told me about that girl you're seeing. Is what she told me true?"

"I don't know yet. What did she tell you?"

"She told me that you licked that girl's pussy, right in your car in the parking lot at your school. She says you did that with half the boys in your school watching you."

"No, that didn't happen. Helen did tell me she was going to tell Ellen that it happened though. Apparently they had some kind of competition between them. I don't know."

"You never even tried to call me."

"You asked me not to."

"Because I was hurt, and because I couldn't believe you were acting like that. You should have known that I wanted you to call me."

"How's school? I'm having a hard time keeping up with everything here. I've only had one date since the last time we spoke, back in July some time."

"Is that the date Ellen told me about? The one where you fucked that girl?"

"I had one date, and it was with Helen, the girl Ellen called to tell you I went out with."

"Did you fuck her or not?"

"What have you been doing, Shirley? I told you I've had one date, what have you had?"

"I haven't done anything with anyone else, Kenny. Did you fuck her, or not?" Shirley was getting angry, and that, in turn, was making me angry too."

"If I say I did, what would that change?"

"I'd know then. If you tell me you did, I'll believe it."

"Do you want to believe it?"

"I want to know the truth, Kenny. Why can't you just answer my question?"

"If I tell you I did, you're going to get mad, and then I won't ever hear from you again. It isn't like I'm saying I didn't, Shirley, because I don't want to lie to you, but it wasn't like I did it, and didn't have some problems with doing it."

"So, you admit you did then."

"Yes. I admit I did."

"I knew it! I just wanted to hear you admit it to me. You know I love you, and you didn't even care about that."

"Shirley, I don't see how this helps either of us. I miss you, but, I have to live the life I have now. As far as I know, that means without you being here with me. If you were here, you wouldn't have gotten any phone call about Helen from Ellen. You aren't here, and it isn't fair for you to be mad at me for dating someone else. I know I can't ask you to put your life on hold either. As far as I knew, our last phone call was going to be our last phone call. You asked me not to call you, and you told me you wanted to make a clean break. Now you call up here, and you try to make me feel bad about something I was already feeling bad enough about. Helen is a nice girl, but she isn't you."

"This call is our last one, Kenny. I spent three months telling myself that you hadn't really done anything with Brenda, Emily or that other girl, the one that took over my old job. I was willing to forgive you about that kissing and feeling up thing with Helen. Now though, you've gone ahead and fucked someone else. Every time I talk to you, you've done something new to destroy my love for you. I don't know why I still love you?"

"Shirley, this isn't doing either of us any good. Unless something changes, and I don't think it will, I think these kind of calls, ones where you pretend we're still together, aren't going to help us. I haven't done anything with Helen that you should be hurt or angry about. Right now, the best we can hope for, is to be friends who care about each other. I care about you, but I know we aren't still together."

"You never said that to me before, Kenny. You told me you loved me the last time we talked. Now, you're telling me all we can ever be is friends?"

"I'm telling you we need to be friends again, before we can ever hope to be anything else. With you living as far away as you do, all we can manage right now is to be friends."

"Did you at least wish it was me with you instead of her?"

"Not a single day has gone by, not since you left, when I haven't wished you were still here. Wishing doesn't work though. I need more than wishes that aren't ever going to come true."

"Was she better than me? Ellen told me you did something weird to her, something that made her cum over and over, from just barely touching her."

"Nobody's ever been half as good to me as we were when we were together."

"There's this boy at school that asked me for a date. He's six eight, and he's a big basketball star at our school. He's a senior, and I think he's already eighteen. I told him I was already seeing someone."

"I think you should go out with him, if he's a nice guy, and if you want to. I can't take you out now, and you're still only sixteen years old. If you were here, it would be different. You should go out with other people, because then, you'd see that just going out doesn't change the way we feel about each other. Its two separate things, Shirley."

"Suppose I decide I want to do things with him, like we did?"

"As long as it's what you want to do. I don't know how you've been, but I really missed having sex."

"You don't want to know. My parents keep saying how sick they are of me being so bitchy to them all the time. I snap at them if they say almost anything to me. I think a lot of it is because I'm so mad that Daddy quit his job, and moved us over here. He had a good job, making a lot more than he does here."

"You've still got your tools?"

"It isn't the same. There's exactly two guys in my school taller than me, the one who asked me out, and this other, black boy, that is already married, and has a little baby with his wife. I either have to go out with Clay, or with nobody."

"Well, I wish you were here, because then you wouldn't have that problem. Have you grown any more?"

"I'm six two and a half now. How about you?"

"I'm probably about that. Since you left, nobody measures me every week."

"The next time you want to make love to somebody, why don't you fly out here to see me?" She said it softly, and I knew she was making me a real offer. I knew it had also involved her swallowing some of her pride to ask me that. Unfortunately, I also knew it wouldn't be a good solution for us. It would be just like before, the two of us trying to avoid admitting it was over. In my mind, that would just prolong the time we'd both be suffering. I didn't want that.

"Because that isn't the way we should try to make things better. If you and I are still going to be separated by so many miles, we should both try to see if we can build a life where we are. You can tell your father that we're making big changes to the way we train our sales people. We aren't training for a one call close anymore. Maybe he'll come back to work with us again."

"What's a one call close?"

"It's something my Dad thinks that yours didn't like teaching. Its a high pressure sales technique. We've made a lot of other changes recently too, and now we're sending people out all over the country in smaller teams. Tell your father that my Dad still likes him, and he's still sorry that your father quit. He could get his old job back, anytime, if he wanted to. All he has to do is call my Dad."

"You don't know my dad very well, not if you think he's ever going to change his mind about leaving. He took a big pay cut to move down here. He isn't even the head sales guy here. He's only a regional sales manager, and one of about five managers who all do the same thing."

"You should tell him anyway, in case he decides he doesn't like where he's working."

When we got through talking, I thought we'd gotten rid of most of the angry stuff. Shirley still was upset, but it was more about the circumstances we were in, and less about my recent actions with Helen. I was thinking about sending Ellen some flowers, to thank her for causing Shirley to call me. I managed to resist that urge, however.