“You were expecting something a little more intimate?” she commented.
“Well, yeah!”
She lifted our son up to eye level, where he squawked and laughed. “You did the intimate thing a year and a half ago. Now, get back to work.”
I took our son and juggled him as he laughed. “Mommy’s not funny. Mommy needs to treat Daddy nicer!”
Marilyn took Charlie back, and handed me a bag with the baby gates. “Daddy’s pushing his luck. Daddy can’t chase Mommy until the baby gates are installed.”
I snorted at that. “Yeah? Then Mommy better get ready, because baby gates are going in!”
I spent the rest of the weekend alternating chores and chasing Mommy around.
Monday morning Taylor called and told me she wanted to talk some more about my proposal, so I invited her to the offices. We met mid-morning, and I introduced her to John and Melissa. “I’m talking to Taylor about outsourcing our travel needs,” I explained.
“Good idea,” commented John. “I was talking to Jake last night and he and Junior are staying in a crappy Holiday Inn in Seattle. There has to be something better than that. It was also a pain to drive down to BWI. They had to get his wife to take the pair of them down, and will need to be picked up when they get back.”
“Yeah, I told them to call and maybe I’d free up to do it,” added Missy.
“Do you see a need for this kind of travel in the future, routinely?” asked Taylor.
I glanced at the others, and then nodded. “Probably. It might come in spurts. Right now we are doing business with a company out in Washington, and I’ve traveled there for a few days, we have another two guys out there now, and probably I’ll be going back, as well as these two. Then we might be doing something elsewhere.”
John quickly interjected. “We should have done this before, but you’ll need to sign a non-disclosure agreement. What we do here is confidential. You can’t speak about it, or where we travel to.”
“I would never do that!”
He smiled, and said, “I never thought you did. It’s just the lawyer in me.”
“Just what do you do here, anyhow?” she asked, curious.
Missy gave her a quick rundown of the private equity and venture capital business, and then tossed in, “There will probably be some travel to New York, too, to see people on the Street.”
I hadn’t thought of that, and I nodded in agreement. “Westminster is the nearest airport. Maybe we can get connecting flights or something from here to larger airports if we are flying commercial. Of course, someday, when we’re big enough, we’ll just buy our own fleet of jets.” I said this with a laugh. “Hey, you never know!”
“I like that idea!” agreed John.
“Something to work for,” said Missy.
I decided to break it up for the moment. “Okay, let me take Taylor into my office. We can work out some details. Priority One is to get the two Jakes into decent quarters closer to where they are. Priority Two is to get Marilyn, Charlie, and me to Honolulu in a couple of weeks. We are visiting an old army buddy and his family who’s stationed out there.”
John snorted. “How come all of your army buddies are in Hawaii and all of mine are in Nebraska? Something’s not quite right about that.”
“How long are you going to be gone?” asked Melissa. “What if they need you in Bellevue?”
I nodded towards Taylor. “That’s what we’re going to be paying her to figure out.” I turned to her. “You can sort that out?”
“Absolutely.”
We made a deal where any of us, or Jake’s secretary, could call Taylor at her office and make arrangements for travel. The bills would cross either my desk or John’s, so we would keep some control on things. Further, vacations, nice high end vacations, would be available. If we closed on the Microsoft deal, I was going to give everyone involved a week wherever they wanted, my treat. We got a message out to the two Jakes to call Taylor at her office about a better hotel, and then she and I sorted out heading out to Hawaii.
At that point, I announced I was done for the day, and handed Taylor off to John to get the non-disclose signed. Then I drove out to the Mount Carmel Road building site. The excavation was done now, and the crawlspace had been poured. The framing was going to start next week. I needed to take Marilyn over to the kitchen designer for a last minute meeting. That was scheduled for after lunch. I went home and made sandwiches for all of us, and then I loaded her and Charlie up and we headed out.
Back when I was selling homes, it was gospel that what sold the homes were the bathrooms and kitchens. Marilyn wanted a fancy bathroom. That was pretty easy. Separate tub and shower, double vanity, decent size linen closet. That was what we had before, or almost. On the first go, we had a combo tub and shower unit. Now I had the room to do both. I made sure the shower was two-person (in case we both needed to get clean at the same time) and I made the tub unit a big whirlpool type, which she loved.
The kitchen I wanted big and fancy. The kitchen was an important part of the house, and very important to a cook like me. Marilyn could get by with a microwave oven, and be convinced it and a refrigerator was all she needed. Me, not so much. I wanted a double oven and a gigantic fridge, with a freezer unit in the utility room. Lots of cabinets and counter space, and a large island. I debated getting a Sub-Zero fridge, one of the enormous types, but then I remembered a trick we used to do in the days I was selling homes. Clayton had a setup where they would park two matching refrigerators side by side, with the doors opening towards each other. If you lined them up right, got them close together, and leveled them up right, it looked like a Sub-Zero at a fraction of the cost.
I also made sure we had a dishwasher. Marilyn thought that was silly, and on the first go, wouldn’t spend the money. She insisted that she was the only one in the house who knew how to wash dishes properly, by hand, with a dishcloth. Brushes or scrubbies wouldn’t do. The kids and I were constantly picking through the dishes to find clean ones. We argued about that for over thirty years, before I scraped up enough money to rebuild the kitchen.
That afternoon, we signed off on the final details and specifications. I wasn’t going for anything exotic. I didn’t need Italian marble countertops; a decent Formica with a beveled edge was just fine. The same went for the cabinets. I didn’t need handmade frosted cherry (which my mother had done). A fairly standard light stained maple from a regular production cabinetry company was quite fine. I’m not a snob, but I did want functionality and practicality. I selected for a number of oddball drawers and cabinets, so I could hide different types of pans and appliances and cutting boards. It would be good looking and practical and comfortable. I wasn’t pushing for Better Homes and Gardens.
Then we all went home. I was enjoying this gentleman of leisure lifestyle! I teased my wife about fooling around, but Charlie wasn’t sleepy. Fun and games would have to wait until after dinner. Marilyn did some knitting and I read some magazines, and we goofed off the rest of the day.
Chapter 74: Hawaii
I had been to Hawaii twice before, once on my first time around, and the other with Marilyn on the trip her parents gave us for our wedding. My first time, way back when, we had stayed at a resort on Hawaii itself, the Big Island, and while we did a little traveling, we never left the island. On the trip this time, we had stayed at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, which is on Waikiki Beach near Diamond Head.