Page 1 of Leo
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Grace
“Well,it’s not the end of the world.” Laura sits back and blows on her scolding hot coffee.
“No,” I say. “It’s not the end of the world. But it is the end of my business. Two years of hard work up in smoke.” I snap my fingers. “Just like that.”
“It can’t have been that bad.”
“It was worse.”
“Didn’t you try showing a bit of cleavage?”
I take a huge bite from my delicious chocolate cake and close my eyes.
Chocolate, you’ll never let me down. Will you?
“I practically flashed him,” I say. “But it didn’t do any good.”
“Probably gay.”
“That’s what I thought,” I giggle.
“Or blind.”
“Well, he didn’t have any problem reading my loan application. That’s for sure. One look at that thing and his face screwed up so much it looked like he’d just taken a big mouthful of cow poo.”
“I don’t get it,” Laura says. “The business is doing great. Why can’t they just lend you a bit more? Keep you tied over until these Hawthorne Group people pay their damn bill?”
“I know, right!” I sip gently at my coffee and look over at the counter. The huge, hotty coffee shop owner makes eye contact with me. For a second I’m under his swell. I can’t look away, even if I tried. But another customer butts in. His attention turns to her and I’m back in the real world. Sitting in a nice, busy coffee shop with my best friend and employee, Laura. Talking about the not so slow, demise of my catering business. “It’s because I already owe them a ton of money,” I sigh. “They say, until I pay back more money, they aren’t willing to lend me any. Even if I do have money coming in and bookings every weekend for the next six months. It doesn’t make a bit of difference to them.”
“It's not fair,” Laura says. “You always pay your suppliers on time. You’ve been paying back your loan on time each month, no problems. You’d think they’d give you a break.”
“Yeah, well… there’s a special place in hell for bankers. And it’s right next to war criminals and human traffickers and that guy in Austria who kept his whole family locked up in a basement and had children with his daughters.”
“Yeesh!” Laura twists her hair and bites her bottom lip. “I was watching this movie last night, and this guy… he needed some money, and he went to a loan shark. Why can’t you do that?”
“A loan shark?” I nearly spit out the coffee in my mouth. Thank god Laura isn’t in charge of my accounting. When it comes to cooking, there’s no one better. But money’s never been her strong suit. “You mean… like the mafia?”
“I guess?” She pulls her phone out of her pocket and starts flicking through social media. “Or like… some kind of nice loan shark. Like, a friendly one. A Good Samaritan loan shark. Someone who’s just out there trying to do some good in the world. Helping out young female business owners whose businesses are about to implode through no fault of their own. There has to be someone out there like that? Doesn’t there?”
“Errr… no,” I say. “And this movie you were watching… how exactly did it end up for the guy who had to borrow money from a loan shark?”
“Well, he couldn’t pay, so they hunted him down and shot him in the knee. Then he tried running away, and they found him and they threw him off the top of a balcony to make an example of him. But that wouldn’t happen to you, would it? I mean, you’d pay the loan back, so they wouldn’t have to make an example?”
“I think I’ll pass,” I say. Then, scrunching up my face and giver her my best Al Pacino impression, I say. “Once they got you, you’re in. There ain’t no going back. They’ll bleed you dry. Bleed you dry, I tell ya!”
Laura looks at me like I've just asked her to work out a quadratic equation in her head. “Was that supposed to be Pacino?”
“No!” I say. “It was Pacino-esque!”
“Uh-huh,” she puts her phone back and taps the back of my hand in an overtly patronizing manner. “Well, at least if this catering thing doesn’t work out, you always have a career in impersonations to fall back on.”
“Don’t be such a smart ass. It gives you wrinkles.”
“Does not.”
“It might,” I tell her, poking out my tongue.
