“It’s not a made-up bone, Iris. It’s—” He grabs his phone, presumably wanting to prove me wrong.
Except I don’t care.
“Well, at least you can put weight on it now.”
“It’s not made up.” He turns his phone toward me. “Fibula.”
I shrug. “I do want to talk to you about what Jack said.”
“Your boyfriend, Jack?”
I give him a don’t-fuck-with-me stare. Bray rolls his eyes and leans back in the visitor chair. “About the freezing?”
“Yeah. What he said made sense, right? Creating a consumer-facing brand is the way to improve margins.”
Bray laughs. “You sound like you just swallowed an MBA. What the fuck are you talking about?”
“If we create a brand that people on the street recognize, we can charge more for it because we’re offering a guarantee of quality. Like Kellogg can charge more for cornflakes than Trader Joe’s.”
“Yeah, I get it. So you’re saying, create a Wilde’s Farm brand?”
“With the frozen fruit,” I add. “We can’t do it as easily with the fresh fruit. Our farm isn’t big enough, or we’d have to have farms all over America or something. But with the frozen stuff? That could work.”
“Except we don’t know how to freeze stuff, and we don’t have freezers. We don’t have any grocery stores calling us telling us they want frozen fruit from us.”
I glare at him some more. He must know he sounds ridiculous. Grocery stores aren’t going to proactively ask for stuff. They have people knocking down their doors, trying to get on the shelves.
“Ihavebeen thinking about the idea Jack had about more unusual fruit being our focus,” Bray says.
I pause. Did my brother just admit that he’d actually been thinking about Jack’s idea? He’d seemed to dismiss it just the same way Dad had, but maybe he’d been a little more open than I thought.
“I think it’s difficult to do that here on Wilde’s Farm,” he says. “But I was wondering…”
I hold my breath, waiting for him to speak.
“We could maybe visit some farms that are already producing the more exotic fruits and maybe freezetheirfruit. That way we can still continue what we’ve got here and we don’t have to worry about weather changes or crop yields. We just buy what other farms have and freeze that. I haven’t thoughtit all through. Would we have to set up some kind of freezing operation near them, or would we have the fruit shipped to us? I’m not sure. I guess we have to look into it. But it would be a way of having that unusual fruit under our brand without being restrained by the Colorado climate or the size of Wilde’s Farm or… It means we could keep doing what we’re doing. Because we know we’re good at that. But this freezing thing? Jack’s right. It could be a way of future-proofing stuff.”
I swallow, because I’m not sure I’m processing what Bray’s saying correctly. He seems all in. Like, he’s really thought about this and actually has taken the idea even further than Jack had. Bray and I don’t have deep, meaningful conversations very often. We talk every day…
Pass the butter…
Did you get that haulage list…
That plate is a foot from the dishwasher. Is it so hard to just open the door and put it in?
That kind of thing. Brother, sister stuff. But we don’t talk about hopes and dreams. We don’t talk about the future and how Dad is getting slower with every passing year. How Bray has picked up a lot of the slack when it comes to organizing the staff but still has to defer to Dad on a lot. It must be tough, and I don’t give him credit for it. Honestly, I barely think about it.
“I agree,” I manage to eke out.
“The thing is,” Bray says. I knew there would be a catch. Now Bray’s going to tell me all the reasons why any kind of change will be impossible. “It’s going to take a lot of work. And focus. Dad is…”
“Not getting any younger,” I say. It’s all we need to say.
“Right, and we’d need to travel to visit with other farms. Plus potentially oversee a freezing operation here. Maybe.”
“We could give Marnie more responsibility. If she wants it.”
Bray nods. “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. She’s capable. Worked this farm longer than me. I think she could take over some stuff, which would free me up a bit. And you could get someone in to help you with the admin. Most of what you do is way above your paygrade.”
