“Did she bring it up?”
“Hell yeah! She showed him the photo and he admitted he was standing on something.”
“But why would he do that?” Dick had said, genuinely confused.
“Richard,” she said—she always used his full name when she was being serious—“I know that no one has given you any reason to worry that you are anything less than perfect, but some people don’t like themselves the way they are.”
“This doesn’t make any sense to me,” he said sincerely.
She turned to him and smiled, her face right near his face. “Your inability to see people’s dark sides never fails to awe me.”
He didn’t, in fact, agree with that assessment; he sometimes felt Olga underestimated him. When it came to business at least, Dick always saw the dark sides of things, but his gift, he felt, was for sensing the opportunities that often lie in wait. Certainly, this had saved him—and their national chain of hardware stores—when his father, still CEO at the time, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Business had already been contracting and Dick knew their investors would pressure them to sell as soon as word got out. So, he got ahead of it, calling an emergency meeting of their board of directors, in which he laid out a plan for expansion into Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Canada that would triple business valuation within two years, making everyone in the room far richer than unloading the business would. A decade later, when the housing market crumbled, people around him panicked; construction and contractors were a huge part of their customer base. But Dick sensed opportunity: if people couldn’t afford new homes, they would likely fix up their old ones. He invented Eikenborn DIY Reno Schools. He cut out the middleman, invested in developing their own line of paints, tools, and toolboxes. He licensed their name to a DIY show on HGTV. By the time the recession was over, Dick had grown Eikenborn and Sons into one of the most profitable retail operations in America. Similarly, while his friends and colleagues lamented the seemingly endless environmental rules and regulations of the Obama era, Dick saw a burgeoning market. He was the first hardware retailer in the country to carry LEED lighting fixtures. They began retailing home solar systems, then launched their own solar panel production operation. From Dick’s point of view, climate change—be it efforts made to mitigate it, or efforts to repair the havoc it caused—would be his greatest boon. Eikenborn Green Solutions would keep the business thriving into its sixth generation, when he imagined, and hoped, that Richard or Sam, or maybe even Victoria, might take the reins from him one day.
These successes had left Dick feeling confident about his place in the world. He had architected a business and a life far greater than the one that his father had mapped out for him. In his mind, having a woman like Olga by his side was the missing piece. Getting her to commit was simply a matter of finding the right approach. His money, he’d come to realize, was not enough. Finally, though, he felt he’d landed on exactly the right tack.
FLYING PRIVATE
Olga had fucked Richard Eikenborn III before she even met him, having siphoned anywhere from $20,000 to $30,000 from his bank accounts and credit cards in the form of administrative fees, product markups, and a new clause in her contract that she realized was a true stroke of brilliance: a late fee that automatically kicked in every day that her clients’ payments were past due, which was almost always.
This idea came to her one Sunday at dinner at Tío Richie’s house out on Long Island. One of her cousins was complaining about his exorbitant credit card bill, largely composed of late fees, which then were compounded with interest. Richie started to lecture on the importance of fiscal responsibility and keeping track of his payment due dates and her cousin whined that the credit card company could have at least called him to remind him about the payment before it was too late, not to mention that he didn’t always have the money exactly when the due date came up. Olga started to explain how that might mean he was charging more than he could afford, but then it hit her. Her clients did have the money to pay her when the due dates came, yet they never did so. Though they never failed to pay her, the only checks sent promptly were the first and the last. The “motivation” payments, as she thought of them. The ones they sent when they were excited for her to start and terrified that she wouldn’t finish. Beyond that, she would always need to call to remind them, and it never achieved anything, except annoy them. “Are you implying that I’m trying to stiff you?” one father of the groom once asked. Subsequently, she ended up being tardy with her own bills, which almost always cost her money, none of which she ever passed on to the clients, because, she had long felt, wasn’t the onus on her to manage her cash flow better? She was certain that these families, with their administrative assistants and money people, never sent a late payment to Amex or Visa. Yet with her, just a small shop, barely a company, they never cared when she got paid. As point of fact, they almost seemed to resent having to send the check.