Page 9 of A Very Daddy Christmas

“I went over the contract last night. And guess what? It’s full of surprise clauses,” she tells me.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, there’s that 8B piece Orson was so eager to throw at us, but there’s also Clause 12B.”

I stare at her with confusion and exhaustion, both hands busy with a dust rag and a spray bottle. “I’m on the edge of my seat here.”

“All isn’t lost,” she says. “Clause 12B states we have until the end of that same two-year term to buy the property at the current market value. The new landlord has the option to sell after twoyears, without giving the tenant a reason, but the tenant can use that time frame to make them an offer. And the best part? The new landlord is obligated to take it in escrow.”

“Okay, I’m even more confused.”

“Let’s say we’ve got about two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars saved up—”

“Which we don’t.”

“Let me finish,” Eva replies with a half-smile. I set the cleaning stuff aside and grab my coffee. Lord knows I need the go-juice. “Let’s just say we have that. Given our history with the previous landlord, we’re entitled to make an escrow offer directly. We put that money into the new landlord’s account, in an escrow account, and it stays there for up to three months. If they don’t get a better offer than ours, he has to take it. The sale is basically automated. The new landlord—in this case Orson—signed for this. He has to accept it.”

I chew on it for a moment. “Wow. Mr. Selznick and his lawyer really went deep with this, huh? Why?”

“You were still little at the time, but I remember hearing Mom and Dad talking about it at one point. They were down here, getting ready to close for the day. They were saving up to buy the building, and they got Mr. Selznick to add some clauses into the contract for when they were ready to put the whole sum down. Granted, they never got to do that, for obvious reasons, but the clauses never left the contract. And Orson consented to it the minute he took over.”

“Mr. Selznick was going to sell to us?”

If only our parents hadn’t died. The real estate market was wholly different ten years ago. The prices have skyrocketed since, and the building—which has the bakery on the ground floor and two apartments upstairs—costs twice as much today than it did a decade ago. Hope is a fickle and dangerous sensation. It can make or break a person.

“So, yeah, we could buy it. Today’s market value puts the building at about two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Eva says, prompting a dry chuckle out of me.

“All of this would be fantastic if we had that kind of money. Even if we sell the ovens and every piece of equipment in this place, we’d barely hit a hundred grand.”

“I’ve been saving up,” my sister mutters.

I’m not familiar with the glimmer I see in her eyes. “Saving up?”

“Yeah. Plus, there’s my college fund Mom and Dad left for me.”

“You never went to college.”

Eva lowers her gaze. “No, I did not.”

“I thought you used that for me. For Paris.”

She sighs deeply. “No. Mom and Dad had a college fund set up for you, too. It wasn’t as big as mine as they were still adding to it, but Carl helped me on that front.”

“Hold on, are you telling me that you and your husband paid for my pastry school?” I am genuinely shocked. I thought Eva made the decision to use her college fund for my studies after our parents died. “Eva, why didn’t you go to college? I mean, you could’ve done more with your life. Wait, that sounded better in my head. I’m sorry.”

Eva laughs lightly. “Babe, I was already pregnant with Aylin, if you remember. Then Teresa came along, and I never gave it a second thought. We had the bakery to run. Carl was making a ton of money with his construction gigs, before the recession, that is. I just left the money there, gathering interest. I started investing some of it over the years. Nothing risky, just long-term, slow, but guaranteed results.”

“You never cease to amaze me.”

“I’m a happy woman, for what it’s worth,” Eva says. “Everything I do, I do gladly. Raising the girls, cooking for my husband, running our parents’ bakery with you, it’s more than enough for me. I like my life simple. Granted, keeping this place afloat has been anything but simple. I can’t let Orson take it away from us. What does he plan to do with the building, anyway? There isn’t a buyer’s market in Madison. Apartments won’t sell here, not in the next couple of years, anyway. He can’t open a second mall. And the authorizations he’d need to repurpose the building for another business profile…” Her voice trails for a moment. “Do you think he wants to sell it to those assholes from Patisserie Parisienne? I know they opened a bakery boutique in his precious mall.”

“They’ve got nothing on us. It’s just the name that’s French. Everything else is just excess sugar and cheap margarine.” I dismiss the possibility. “Overpriced and way too flaky. That’s why we have so many regulars after all these years, why the local and online guides always recommend us to incoming tourists during the holiday season.”

Even so, it’s been a weird couple of years. People don’t have as much money to spare anymore. Everything has gotten so expensive that getting a coffee and an artisanal bagel is now considered a luxury, even for the middle-class folks of Madison.

“We’re digressing. Point is, Cora, I think we can pull this off,” Eva says.

“How much money have you actually saved?” I ask, lifting the cup to my lips for a cautious sip.

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