Bray narrows his eyes. “So you’re not wanting a day’s work to take my sister to Pizza Meet Ya tonight?”
I start to laugh. “Irony is, Iamtaking your sister to Pizza Meet Ya tomorrow night, but no, I don’t need a day’s salary from you to make that happen.”
“You have your own place in New York City?”
“I do.”
“No mortgage I’m guessing.”
I stay silent.
“You have your own plane? Yacht? Baseball team.”
“No plane since my grandfather died. No yacht. And no baseball team.”
“But not because you can’t afford it, right?”
“Right.”
We eat in silence for a few minutes.
“I noticed the Wilde’s Farm brand isn’t on any of the packaging that gets sent to customers.”
“They want to use their brand names.”
“That makes sense. It gives them more power.”
“I guess,” he says. “We just do what the customers want. I think we did offer them Wilde’s Farm fruit at one point, but that’s not what they want.”
“And it puts the risk on you, because if you don’t sell Wilde’s Farm fruit, you can’t easily repackage because the fruit will go bad.” I think to myself. “What about freezing?” I ask.
“The bigger crates go to companies that freeze the food.”
“Oh, I see. So some of it goes to be frozen, but you don’t do that?”
“We don’t have the equipment. We’d need an entirely new setup. Fast freezers. Trucks to carry that stuff. And then all the packaging for it would be different.”
My mind starts whirring at all the possibilities. “Yeah. It would be a complete shift in the way you did business.” I frown, trying to think through the implications for Iris. “And what about organic stuff? You do much of that?”
“We looked into it a while back. I can’t remember what happened about that.” He pushes his tray away from him. “You’re really interested in fruit, huh?” he asks.
“I like hearing about other people’s businesses. New businesses. And what are the margins like in the fruit business?”
“They’re okay. Every year feels a little tighter than the last, but we get by. We had to change the menu in the lunch room,” he says. “We’ve had to change the supplier of our boxes and the haulage company. We’re always making savings.”
“Being on top of your costs is always a good thing.”
“Iris’s really good at that,” he says, clearly a proud brother.
She would be. She’s smart. But cost control can only go so far.
I take a bite out of my burrito, the cogs in my brain turning. Iris’s priority is her family and Wilde’s Farm. The reason she stayed here and didn’t go to New York was because she was worried things couldn’t survive without her. But what if Wilde’s Farm was in such a strong financial position that they didn’t have to rely on Iris anymore? Wouldn’t that give her freedom? Freedom to leave the farm and live anywhere?
Maybe even New York.
SEVENTEEN
Iris
