Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 94106 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 376(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94106 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 376(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
“I take it that’s not an easy decision.”
“It is and it isn’t. The storage business still makes a profit, but the office space is a much higher return on investment. One of the buildings that could be available to convert soon is the first one my parents bought twenty-five years ago. It was special to them, so it feels wrong to change things… They worked so hard to build what they had.”
I might not be a business mogul, but I knew adding emotion to any business decision made it so much harder. “Let me ask you something. If your father was still here, and he saw the numbers for the office space compared to the storage business, what would he do?”
Ford smiled. “He’d convert them all except for the building they started with. He’d keep that one for my mom.”
I shrugged. “Well, maybe that’s your answer, then.”
He thought about that for a minute and then nodded. “You know what? You’re right. I’m looking at it wrong. I should be honoring my father by doing what I think he would do, not by freezing his business in time.”
I bumped my shoulder to his playfully. “Boy, that was easy. Your job seems like a piece of cake.”
Ford chuckled and finished off his beer. He stood and offered his hand to help me up. “Come on. It’s your turn. We’ll solve all your problems during our walk.”
“What if I don’t have any problems?”
He smirked. “Oh, but you do. Your head and your body are at odds on a certain issue. That’s one we should discuss in detail.”
***
“So when do you get your results from the test you took?”
Ford and I had walked about forty-five minutes down the beach. Behind us, the sun was beginning to go down, and the sky lit up with gorgeous shades of orange and purple, so we turned around to head back and enjoy the view.
“Seventeen days.”
“That’s not too bad.”
“No, not at all. I did my student teaching with an older woman who said it took two months to get her results years ago.”
Ford smirked.
“What?”
“I was just thinking how you’re going to be that teacher—the one who gives all the high school boys wet dreams.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Ugh. Don’t even say that.”
“What? I totally would have been fantasizing about you if you were my teacher.” Ford chuckled. “In all seriousness, I think it’s cool you went back to school and got your degree—decided to become a teacher. Did you always want to be one?”
“Yeah. Ever since third grade, when I had Mrs. Moynihan. I loved to read, but I had a weird obsession with outer space at the time. Every Monday and Friday, we would go to the school library and pick out books to read during quiet time. All the other kids picked out books like Harold and the Purple Crayon, while I wanted to read books about Pluto and space asteroids. Some of my classmates had begun to make fun of me—calling me Valentina from Venus, so I switched to books similar to the other kids’, even though I didn’t really enjoy them. Anyway, Mrs. Moynihan noticed, and one day at the library she handed me a book she said she thought I’d like. The outside was a regular, popular kids book, but inside was a book about the solar system. She’d taken the paper cover off a book and put it on what I really wanted to read so I could read in private.”
“That’s awesome.”
“I kept changing out the covers until two weeks after we got back from Christmas break, when we had a guest speaker—a retired astronaut. He brought an old space suit, and all the kids went crazy. The next week, they all started taking out books about astronauts on library days. Mrs. Moynihan was always special to me. I kept in touch with her for years. When I was in tenth grade, she died, and my mom took me to her wake. We walked over to Mr. Moynihan to give condolences, and he recognized my name. Turned out, the reason he remembered my name was because his wife had spent an entire Christmas break hand-writing letters to a hundred-and-fifty astronauts begging them to come speak at the school because she had a student who needed the others to see how cool space could be.”
“Wow. A hundred-and-fifty, hand-written letters. That’s dedication.”
I nodded. “What did you want to be when you were little?”
Ford grinned. “Well, it changed as I got older, but in kindergarten my teacher had us draw pictures of what we wanted to be. I drew Santa Claus.”
“You wanted to be Santa?”
“Don’t laugh. It’s a damn good job. You only work one night a year, you get to fly around on a sleigh pulled by kick-ass reindeers, and everyone leaves you cookies on the table when you stop by.”