Blithedale Canyon by Michael Bourne

Author:Michael Bourne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

“Uncle Stav, Andi—are they coming?” Gianni asked.

His father slid his tired eyes toward me, looking for an ally. “Your uncle said he might drop by,” he said. “If he finishes piecing out the beef delivery on time.”

“Should we wait?” Gianni asked. “I figured they might want to hear some of this.”

The truck that delivered sides of beef from an organic processing plant north of Petaluma had left at noon, eight hours ago. If by now Stavros and his meat room crew hadn’t cut and dressed the half dozen beef sides the store went through in a week, it wasn’t going to happen.

“Let’s get started,” Papadakis said. “If they show, they show.”

All that week I had stayed late helping Gianni create a spreadsheet detailing the competing bids for a fleet of delivery vans. Originally, he’d planned to buy three vans, each painted Grecian blue with the Chef Tamalpais logo painted on the sides. But with the cost of renovations on the new building soaring, he’d scaled back to two vans and a golf-cart-looking thing for deliveries around town—and even that was looking like it might bust the budget.

It was eight o’clock on Thursday night when his dad showed up to look at our spreadsheets. Papadakis had been at the store when the doors opened at seven that morning and he looked it, his eyes red-rimmed, his shirt collar flecked with tomato sauce, but when he took a seat across from Gianni and me at the conference table, he rubbed his hands together like a guy sitting down to a hot meal. “Okey doke,” he said. “What’ve you got for me?”

Gianni walked his father through the bids, explaining how they could shave a few dollars here and get a better price there, while I handed him spreadsheets and vehicle specs. Most of the bids were non-starters, but two—one from a dealership in Oakland, another near Fresno—had come in at $80,000 including tax and service contracts. When Gianni turned over the last spreadsheet, showing the final tally, his father nodded slowly, lips pursed, his expression unreadable.

“This is before you hire drivers, right?” he asked.

“Yeah, and that could get pricey,” Gianni said. “So, if we want to go a little less aggressive”—I handed him another stack of spreadsheets, which he passed to his father—“I looked at leasing the vans instead of buying them. That gets us down to five grand a month. You pay more over the life of the fleet, of course, but it does bring down your up-front costs.”

Papadakis flipped through the second set of spreadsheets, squinting through his half glasses. “I talked to Hal this morning,” he said, setting the papers aside.

Hal, I knew, was Harlan Stafford, the loan officer handling the Tam Grocery account at the Savings Bank of Marin.

“Dad, if we listened to Hal, we never would have tried this in the first place,” Gianni said.

“They’re three hundred grand into this thing already,” his father said. “If we want them to open up the credit line any more, we’ll have to take out a mortgage on this building here.

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