Chapter 28

Bev and Liz ended up at the Benjamin house with Rich for the next two days looking up hospitals and medical facilities through the region that had been affected by the storm while Rich was busy on the phone making calls. It turned out that only three of the four hospitals that had contacted Rich had equipment that had been damaged. The fourth hospital was merely a matter of coincidence. However, that did not stop Rich from making additional sales with hospitals that had never before done business with his company.

Rich sat back in his chair after the last call and said, “That was good. I’ve added six more hospitals as customers. The sales might not have been major league, but they were sales our company wouldn’t have had. It has been a long time since I’ve done any cold calling like that.”

“It looks to me like you do a pretty good job,” Liz said. She had been impressed with how he had managed to start up conversations with complete strangers on the telephone.

“I managed to make a quarter of a million dollars in sales over the past two days. I usually don’t even do that much in a month,” Rich said. When he added in the million dollars in sales of the first day of the storm, he had done a tremendous job over the past three days.

Bev said, “You work on commission, right?”

“Yes. Five percent,” Rich answered. He had made over sixty thousand dollars when everyone else was stuck at home.

“That’s pretty good,” Bev said.

Abby and Cheryl were at the local school with the boys. The boys were pulling their sleds up to the top of a small hill and riding down while the two women stood off to the side watching them. Cheryl said, “Rich made a lot of money over the past two days.”

“That’s good,” Abby said. She looked at the young mother and asked, “What are you going to do with it?”

“We’re going to get rid of a bunch of our bills. We’ve got a bunch of loans for furniture, electronics, and our car. I’m paying them off,” Cheryl said. She didn’t have the words to express how that prospect made her feel. It didn’t matter that taxes and social security were going to get about forty percent of his commission. It was still a lot of debt that could be eliminated. She added, “I’m going to try to put away five thousand for savings.”

The idea of having that much money set aside in a saving account made her head spin. She couldn’t imagine it. Abby said, “That’s good.”

“I figure paying off a couple the loans will give us more than a thousand dollars a month,” Cheryl said. They still had the student loan to payoff. She felt that was going to hang over their head for the rest of their life.

“I guess that you’ll be leaving the commune,” Abby said.

Cheryl looked horrified at the idea and said, “No way. That’s been the best thing that has ever happened to us.”

“I didn’t think Rich was all that wild about joining it,” Abby said. She remembered how he had acted the first meeting. She figured that he would jump at the first chance to leave.

“He’d never admit it, but he enjoys working on stuff with Jack and Dave. I guess his father never did that kind of stuff with him when he was growing up. He tells me all the time about the things he’s learned from the two of them,” Cheryl said. He had even suggested kicking in a little of the money to help pay for some of the repairs.

Abby asked, “How do you feel about it?”

“Me? I love the commune. I love the boys, but it sure is nice to have a dozen babysitters on call at all hours of the day and night,” Cheryl said. There were some evenings when she and Rich went home alone and did nothing except cuddle and talk for a couple of hours.

“They are a handful,” Abby said in agreement.

Cheryl asked, “What are your plans?”

“I’m hoping that I can borrow your computer to make up some flyers advertising packing services,” Abby said.

“Of course you can borrow it. Rich will help you make the flyers,” Cheryl said.

Smiling at the other woman appreciatively, Abby said, “I figure I’ll charge about ten dollars an hour. It will be three dollars an hour more than what I make at the Taco Emporium.”

“What’s going on at the Taco Emporium?” Cheryl asked.

Shaking her head in disgust, Abby said, “Things aren’t so good there. December first the fat tax kicked in. Our prices also went up because of the increase in corn prices. That damned bio-fuel is eating up the entire corn crop. The average order went up by fifteen percent overnight. A year ago a taco was ninety-nine cents and now it is a dollar thirty. Every customer complained about the increase in price. We had people leave when they heard how much their order cost.”

“I can understand why,” Cheryl said. She had heard on the news that the inflation rate was about two percent, but that was because of the drop in housing prices. When house prices dropped thirty percent in a year, that meant the rest of the market kicked up by thirty-two percent.

“My boss hasn’t said it to us, but I overheard him talking to someone on the phone that he thinks the store won’t be in business six months from now,” Abby said. She would be surprised if it lasted four months.

It was definitely a bad sign when management started bailing out of a company. Cheryl said, “That’s bad. Are you going to keep the job while you are starting your packing business?”

“I was thinking about it, but I’ve decided that I’m going to send out the flyers and quit when I get the first job,” Abby answered. The idea of doing that terrified her.

“Why?”

She had made almost as much packing up the stuff at Penny’s house part-time as she did at her job working the whole week. In fact, that was the only reason she was able to pay rent and food that month. Abby answered, “I can’t pack up houses during the day if I have to work at the Taco Emporium. I’ll be making three dollars an hour more packing boxes and I might be able to work six or seven full days a week. When you take into account that I might be able to earn more every hour and work more hours a week, I really can’t afford to stay at Taco Emporium.”

“I remember Jack making that same argument,” Cheryl said.

Abby said, “To tell the truth, it scares the hell out of me.”

“I don’t know if I could do it,” Cheryl said. She was so lucky that Rich had managed to keep his job and she didn’t have to work. She noticed that Chuck had a real good ride down the hill and shouted out, “Way to go Chuck!”

“Watch me!” Mike shouted wanting to get a little attention from his mother.

“I figure it this way. A lot of elderly are going to move in with their kids over the next month or two. I’ll have two months to get ready to do that house watching business. That’s where I think I’ll have the best chance of success,” Abby said watching Mike ride down the hill on his sled. She gave him a thumbs up.

“Good job, Mike,” Cheryl shouted. She glanced over at Abby and asked, “Why do you think it is your best chance of success?”

“I was thinking of it this way. The banks are holding mortgages on a lot of these properties. They aren’t going to be able to sell them for a while considering the way the market is acting. They won’t want the houses to lose value because they are falling apart. They want to get as much money out of them as possible. I figure that if I charge twenty-five dollars per house per month, that it will cost them only three hundred dollars a year to maintain the value. One bad accident to the house and they could lose ten times that much,” Abby said.

“That does make sense,” Cheryl said. She wondered if it made too much sense for a bank. Considering the stupidity that the financial markets were demonstrating, a little common sense might be asking too much of them.

“So if I can get a contract for forty houses, that’s a thousand dollars a month. That’s what I was making at Taco Emporium working thirty-two hours a week,” Abby said. She had spent a couple of hours working over the numbers over the past two days.

“You shouldn’t have much difficulty getting forty houses,” Cheryl said. There were more houses than that within a twelve block radius. She said, “There are six houses for sale on our street alone.”

“That’s what I was thinking. I also figured that the people moving in with their relatives wouldn’t want their houses to lose value either. I don’t know what the numbers are, but I figure that I might be able to get a lot more than forty houses total,” Abby said. She was hoping that she could get fifty houses.

Cheryl said, “That would be a lot of work.”

Abby shrugged her shoulders and said, “I figure that I could do a walkthrough of a house in less than ten minutes. All I would be doing is checking the windows, make sure that the heat is still working, and see if there were any obvious signs of damage. I could do about five houses an hour if they are close together. Forty houses would be an eight hour day. I could go through the houses once every three days or so.”

“What about when a storm comes?” Cheryl asked. She figured that people would want their houses checked as quickly as possible after a storm.

“I don’t know,” Abby answered. She didn’t have all of the answers yet.

“You’ll figure something out,” Cheryl said watching the boys slide down the hill. She shouted, “You’re doing real good, boys.”

“They are having fun, aren’t they?” Abby said.

“Yeah. They are so lucky to be young and unaware of how bad things are. I worry about what kind of world they’ll be inheriting. Will they have opportunities when they get older?” Cheryl asked.

“I don’t know,” Abby said.

Cheryl said, “They don’t think there is anything special about life around the commune. I’ll admit that they are happy to have a dozen grannies all of a sudden. They enjoy playing sports with Jack. To them, this is just how life is.”

“It sure is different to how I grew up,” Abby said thinking that maybe the boys were having a better start to life than she had. She was basically a latchkey kid and that was a pretty lonely childhood. It got worse when her parents divorced.

“Same here,” Cheryl said. “I had a lot more toys than they do.”

“I guess I did too,” Abby said. She hadn’t appreciated it at the time. Of course, a new doll wasn’t a replacement for a hug. She said, “They get a lot more attention, though.”

“You know that they’ll run up to the house and tell all of the little old ladies about their adventures on the huge hill at the big kid’s school. Claire will clap her hands and praise them for being so brave for facing such a dangerous challenge. Liz and Bev will hug them. The boys will eat up the attention,” Cheryl said.

Abby sighed and said, “I would have killed for that kind of attention when I was their age.”

“They’ll be talking about this afternoon until they get to bed,” Cheryl said.

“I know. I could see Jack out there with them,” Abby said. He would have been out there helping the boys drag the sleds up to the top of the hill. He probably would have taken a couple of rides down the hill as well.

Cheryl said, “It has been kind of strange not having Jack around.”

“He’ll probably make it home tonight,” Abby said.

“I felt kind of sorry for Dave. He’s a little too old to be out shoveling snow like that. Jack would have made sure that he didn’t over do it,” Cheryl said.

“My aching back wishes Jack had been here. I never really thought about how much physical work shoveling snow was,” Abby said.

Jack picked up the log and carried it over to the stack. One of the older trees on campus had fallen during the storm and they were cutting it up. He straightened up and twisted from side to side to loosen his back. One of the students came over with three cups of hot chocolate. Jack turned to the two men cutting the tree and shouted, “Hey. Stop the chainsaw.”