Page 104 of Good as Gold
“Sad but true. I took this job because you guys care about the details. I’ve worked for a few guys who didn’t.”
“And we appreciate that.”
“Can I ask you a question?” His young brow furrows. “Are you going to be okay up there? After last year. You know…”
“Yeah, I’ll be all right,” I insist. “We’ll take some runs together before our first booking, yeah? You’ll meet the pilots, we’ll make a few turns, and work out any kinks.”
His smile is quick. “Sounds great.”
The door opens on Cara. “Hey, peeps!” She stomps her boots on the mat. “How’s it going?”
“Great,” Jeffrey says. “I’m about to make my first few calls to clients.”
“Here you go,” I say, passing him a pen. “You can have my desk.”
“Thanks, man.”
I move over to talk to Cara, who’s booting up her computer. Sean’s face smiles out at us from the homepage of our website.The adventure of your life awaits!brags the text.
Not for the first time, I wonder when we’ll swap it out. It seems wrong to change that picture. Yet it also seems wrong to leave it up.
That’s what happens when somebody dies—everything seems wrong.
She clears her throat. “I took his bio off our staff page last week when I added Jeffrey’s.”
“Oh,” I say brilliantly.
Jeffrey is chatting away with a client, and Cara drops her voice. “How’s our bank balance?”
“Healthier than last month,” I tell her. “Lots of deposits hitting up.” We charge a down payment of seven-hundred-fifty dollars per person when they book a full day, and four-hundred dollars when they book a half day.
That’s what killed us last winter—refunding all those deposits after we canceled our season. Thank God our cashflow is headed in the right direction again.
She grabs a pen and taps it nervously against the desktop. “Got a call this morning. From somebody on the board of the Aspen Mountain Corp.”
“Yeah? What did they want?”
“They really pissed me off.” She tosses the pen onto the desk in disgust. “The guy was full of regret over Sean, and for a minute I thought they wanted to honor him in some way. But then he tells me the corporation might be looking to buy a heli-ski operation.”
My blood stops circulating. “You meanourheli-ski operation?”
“Can you believe his nerve?” Cara whispers. “They’re vultures, thinking we’re in a vulnerable place, and they can just swoop in and pick up our business for pennies on the dollar.”
“Did he give a price?” I hear myself ask.
“No. And I told him we’d never sell out Sean’s legacy to a big corporation. That’s not who we are.”
My heart drops. “Of course not,” I say softly.
Of course not.
CHAPTER39
MATTEO
I’m just tightening my snowboard boots when my sister’s text comes in.
Zara
