“I agree. They let you stand there while they talk to their friends on their phones, or aren’t helpful when you’re looking for something.”
“We want our customers to leave satisfied, wanting to come back to us soon.”
“Well, I certainly will,” he said, smiling at her, having run out of excuses to keep talking to her. He had enjoyed their brief exchange. “I’ll come back soon, and my daughter made me promise I’d bring her too.”
“We’ll be happy to see you both,” Spencer said, and meant it. She’d enjoyed talking to him too. He was well-spoken and intelligent. She wondered who he was. He had an air of power and success about him, which he didn’t abuse, but it was there, she could easily sense it about him. “Thank you for your visit. Come back soon,” she said as he walked away with a last smile at her. He was still thinking about the whole experience as he got into a cab, and was still impressed by it when he got to his midtown office on Park Avenue and saw Renee.
“Well, I can see what you mean,” he said, when she stopped to talk to him in the hall. “I had a conference call at home this morning, and I stopped at Brooke’s on the way uptown. What an amazing place. Everything about it is perfect. The décor, the atmosphere, the sales staff, the merchandise. It makes you want to stay there all day and buy everything. They have fabulous things. I’d be broke in a week,” he said, and Renee laughed.
“I am every time I go there, but I always love everything I get. It’s never disappointing when I get it home, and the quality is fantastic. They really pick their merchandise well. And you don’t see it on everyone else. A lot of it is one-of-a-kind.”
“I spoke to some woman manager, and she said she loves working there. They must be very good to their staff. They are all very pleasant and can’t do enough to help you.”
“Now you can see why I suggested it yesterday. The place is a gem. I’m not sure how it would fare though if you moved it uptown. Even the building is special and has a kind of magic to it.”
“It’s been beautifully redone. They must have used a great architect,” Mike commented. He had noticed that the finishes were high quality. It was all expensive work.
“They did. The architect was someone from Italy, I think. Or maybe France.”
“They don’t look like they’re hurting for money or customers. The place was busy. What makes you think they’d want to sell, or even need investment money and partners?”
“Wishful thinking, I guess.” Renee smiled at him. “I’d love to own it, and you can afford to.”
“I can’t imagine them selling. The place just reeks of the owners’ pride. Why don’t you see who owns it now and what you can find out about their financial situation.”
“I’ll do some digging and see what I can find out,” Renee promised, and went back to her office, as Mike went to his. The project sounded like fun to Renee.
Mike had a dozen phone messages and thirty emails when he got to his desk, about various projects the firm was involved in. He forgot about Brooke’s for the time being, although when he thought about the brown suede shoes he was sorry he hadn’t bought them. But he could easily see why Jenny loved the store, and why his mother remembered it so well fifty years later. It really was a very special place.
When Mike left the store, Spencer walked around for a few more minutes to finish her morning tour and went back to her office. Her CFO, Paul Trask, called her a few minutes later and asked to come to see her.
She greeted him warmly when he walked in, and wondered what he had on his mind. He did an excellent job as their chief financial officer. He was one of her new hires when her father died and she became CEO. He was very effective at running the store’s finances, investing her money, and advising her. Paul dealt with Spencer’s mother on a regular basis. Eileen continued to get more and more difficult as she got older. She was lonely without Tucker. She was seventy-five now, and not aging well. Physically she was fine, but she was unhappy and depressed and always complaining about something, and terrified the money would run out. She had no faith in Spencer’s ability to run the store competently, and was sure she’d run it aground and they’d wind up penniless. That wasn’t even a remote possibility, and Paul was patient about reassuring Eileen frequently that all was well.
“How’s my mother?” Spencer asked him with a look of concern when he sat down across from her. He had far more patience with Eileen than her own daughter did. But Eileen was much kinder to him than she was to Spencer, to whom she constantly predicted doom, and disapproved of everything she did.