It’s nice to know I’m not the only one thrown completely off my game by this situation.
When I’m settled in for the night on the sofa, I check my phone for the first time in hours. Angelo has texted a couple of times. Your brother saved our asses tonight. You owe him big.
Thanks, I’ll spot him some cash for filling in.
Not like you to disappear when we’re busy. What’s going on?
Just some personal stuff that came up. Sorry to leave you hanging.
No worries. I’m going home. Will be back on it tomorrow afternoon.
Thanks for working during the holidays.
Thanks for paying me double time to do it.
LOL. You got it.
I wanted to be free to spend as much time with my family as I could this Christmas. We’re all so thankful to see my mom heading toward the end of her cancer treatment—we hope—and I was hoping for the chance to be with Sofia and Mateo as much as she’d let me be. I never expected to be crashed on her sofa on Christmas Eve.
I send a text to Miguel. Are you hearing anything from Joaquín’s crew that I need to worry about?
Miguel responds ten minutes later. Just some smack talk, but nothing concrete. We’re keeping an eye on her place. R u there?
Yeah.
If there’s any trouble, call me. Don’t get into it with them.
I hear you.
I’ll check in tomorrow.
Thanks for this.
You got it.
The thought of anyone coming after her because of her asshole ex fills me with anxiety. I can’t be with her and Mateo all the time, as much as I wish I could. After tomorrow, I’m back to work driving customers and tending to my fledgling business. I’ve got everything riding on its success, and I can’t afford to check out.
Between maintenance, insurance and staffing, it’ll be a while before we’re fully profitable, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel coming in the next few years.
Like most small-business owners, I work part-time—twelve hours a day most days. I heard that joke at a meeting I attended to network with other business owners. I handed out a hundred business cards that day and landed at least ten new regulars. The parking at the airport is obscenely expensive. By undercutting prices offered by ride-sharing services, we get a lot of that business.
People told me I was crazy to get into the car service business in the age of Uber and Lyft, but we’re finding that customers like doing business with a local company. It hasn’t hurt that my uncle Vincent lets me put business cards in every check delivered at Giordino’s. We’ve gotten a ton of new customers from that outreach and from word of mouth.
I’m enjoying the challenge of building something from the bottom up. We started with two cars and now have fifteen. I hope to have thirty by the end of next year. The more cars we have, the more money we can make, but the key is to keep them all running at least seven hours a day. We’re getting closer all the time to that goal, but we’re not quite there yet. Once we surpass that milestone, I’ll start adding more cars to the fleet.
My father, the accountant, and my mother, the lawyer, have been instrumental in helping to get my business up and running. But all the risk is mine, and I intend to make a success of it.