“How many employees?” I know that number. That number haunts me.
“Forty-nine,” I reply. “So, you understand now, right? Surely you must. Now you see how—”
“Oh, Daddy,” she says. She shakes her head and reaches out a hand to stroke my cheek. “How can you be so stupid?”
“Be careful little girl,” I growl.
She doesn’t cower but glares at me. “Tu n'es pas un raté, tu es un putain de saint! Pourquoi dites tu cela?” she snaps. She keeps speaking in French, just rattling things off so quickly I probably wouldn’t understand any of it even if I spoke French.
“Little girl,” I say sharply. She stops and still glares at me. “I don’t understand anything you said,” I say. “I’m not correcting your tone. I’m just not following you.” I sigh. “I guess I should probably correct your tone, too.”
She smiles a little guiltily and says, “It is probably good you do not understand most of it. I will tell you the first part. I said you are not a failure. You are a saint.” She presses her lips together and blushes a bit as she says, “Well, I said you are a fucking saint. How can you call yourself a failure? You kept forty-seven families alive. You sacrificed everything to keep your employees having breakfast indoors.” She furrows her brow again and says, “you say a roof over your head, I think. You made sure they had food and a roof over their head.”
How in the world have I never once thought of things the way she just described them? “I…” I can’t finish. I just don’t know how to finish. I’ve been with this girl for months now and she surprises me all the time.
“Thank you,” I say.
“So, when will we start, Daddy?” she asks.
I sigh. “I still don’t know if I will do that deal but I’ll tell you the problem, so you’ll understand, OK. You can work on it a little and then we’ll figure out where to go from there. The loan I would get is called a hard money loan. Ordinarily, I would be able to get a better loan because of the rents from the apartment building.”
“OK, Daddy. What do I do?”
I say, “But the rents aren’t quite good enough to support the loan payments along with the amount I would spend getting the property repurposed, so the apartments are condominiums.”
“I don’t know what that word means, Daddy,” she says.
“Um… Here, what it means is something a person can own instead of just lease. Most places, anyway. In New York, sometimes condominiums and apartments are used interchangeably. Here, it just means people can own their own home and pay a fee for the upkeep of the hallways and the outer part of the building. They’re not just paying a landlord.”
“Oh! I see. So, it costs money to change it and the loan will be expensive because of that? But if the loan can be better, then you can buy it and you can make your con… condom…”
“Condominiums.”
“So, you will send me the, how do you say, the… the books? I can practice my accounting certificate and see if there is anything different?”
“Yes,” I say. “I will send you the numbers and if you can figure out anything I missed, that will change the deal.”
“And then you can make your condoms without having to spend all your money to keep your employees eating and in a house under a roof!” she says.
“It’s condominiums,” I say with a laugh. “Yes. That’s what I mean. If the numbers are wrong, it changes everything. But remember. Condominiums or condos. Condoms are… They’re birth control.”
“What is that?”
I explain and a moment later, her eyes grow wide. She turns red and says, “Préservatifs?” She ends up giggling and says, “I do not think a family would want to live in one of those, Daddy!” She ends up giggling and she’s so bright and happy I can’t help but giggle along with her.