Page 23 of The Hampton Beach Café 3
That took her by surprise. Normally art dealers tried to wheedle a once-off dollar amount to maximize their return on the exchange.
"Is she jacking the price up for the clients, though?" Alex asked.
"Nope, every piece in there is allocated to a specific person," Vince said. "Lucinda and I went through the contract and checked. The clients each know how much she paid for the piece, your commission, her commission, all of it."
Lucinda bumped Vince with her elbow. "She's thinking that he's going to be big and famous. She's out one of the stone pieces in her investment fund."
"How do you know that?" Vince asked, looking down at Lucinda.
"Well, duh, one of the clients is L.D. Alt Growth."
Cocking her head to one side, Frances processed how that might work legally. "So she's listing an investment fund as a client...does that just mean she's allocated it to her own non-traditional investments, or is it a listed company?"
"What's an Alt Growth?" Vince asked.
"It's a type of investment that you expect to grow but isn't a company," Lucinda explained.
"People use it as a protection against market ups and downs," Frances added. "Like, if you buy a company and it turns out the CEO...I dunno eats babies for breakfast or something universally horrific, that company is pretty likely to plummet in value, but it might come back over twenty years if it's actually a good company. Whereas if you buy something like a piece of art or gold, it's unlikely to be so hugely affected by those sorts of swings. Plus, they'll maintain their value and even grow over time as the economy does, or as the artist gets more popular. If L.D. Alt Growth is what we think it is, she must genuinely think you'll be selling for more than today's value in ten or twenty years."
All three of her friends had paused to look at her. Lucinda was the only one who didn't look entirely shocked.
"What?" she asked. "I've been in risk management for half my life. I know what defensive assets are."
Lucinda laughed, and Vince shook his head. "Well...it sounds like a good thing?"
"Yeah, hon," Lucinda said. "It's a good thing. You want to add investments to our curriculum?"
Alex sent a sideways glance at Frances as if to say, 'look look look!'.
She was looking, and she saw––she wasn't sure how Lucinda didn't see the way Vince was looking at her with barely concealed awe and admiration, but he was.
"Uh...maybe, let's get my brain on board with what we've been working on so far, ok?"
Lucinda smiled up at him. "Yeah, sure, whatever you want."
Frances blinked hard. Whatever he wanted? Lucinda was not that kind of business coach...she was a drill Sargent.
Oh, she had it bad,Frances realized and wondered how long it would take Lucinda to notice.
TWELVE
Standing outside the white clapboard barber shop brought back feelings and memories she didn't know she had.
There should be nothing about standing on this street corner that made her feel this way, but looking down the wide open street with the sign for Mac's on one side and Mike's on the other, Frances could remember standing in that exact spot when she was a child.
Less than ten years old, she reckoned that she wasn't in school for some reason. She was with her mom, and her mom was mad.
Not at her, because if it had been at her, she wouldn't have been allowed to come out with her mom on her errands. This was before her mom had gone back to work, she realized as she thought about it. So, that would have to mean that she was only six or seven....
The version of her mom she saw in her memory kneeled down on one knee in front of her, holding her tightly in both hands.
'You stay right here. Don't move a muscle, ok?"
'Why can't I come in mommy?' Frances remembered asking.
'Because your daddy's getting his hair cut. It's a bit like going to the doctor. You don't really want to interrupt people while they're in there.'
Even as a little girl, this had confused her––she also didn't care if her mom came into the doctor with her, so the story made no sense. Looking back on it as an adult, she realized it was probably because her mom was going in there to have a whispered argument with her dad about something. She hadn't known, then, of course. It had taken her a couple more years to really catch on that her parents were anything less than perfect. No matter how it looked to Alex, who had always assumed that her family had been completely dysfunctional, they had been a good family. They didn't have a lot of money. Her dad was always away for work––though she never really understood what he actually did for work––and her mom was a nurse who also worked constantly. They weren’t bad parents, just...busy.
