Chapter 13

Selena was walking up to her apartment when she encountered the manager of the complex. In an attempt to be friendly, she asked, “How are you doing?”

“I’m fine. I finally got rid of that damned cat,” the manager said.

“What did you do with it?” Selena asked.

“I dropped it off at the SPCA. They don’t take strays down at the pound anymore,” the manager said.

“I think a lot of people liked that cat,” Selena said.

She wasn’t the only one feeding it. She knew several residents put out bowls of milk or water for it. During the summer months it wore a flea collar.

“You know the policy about pets. The damned thing was shitting in the flowerbeds,” the manager said.

“It was just a nice cat,” Selena said worried about the cat.

“It’s gone now,” the manager said.

Selena went into her apartment and returned to work. She was making good progress on putting together a line of thirty calendars. The photographers had responded well to her calls. Several of them, knowing she was starting out on her own, gave her pretty nice price breaks. Several of the smaller distributors had agreed to take enough units to make it a profitable year. She was still negotiating with the printers to get a good price, but she was pleased with how the talks were going.

One other little piece of good news was that Max was using her, to contact artists for his specialty websites. She was getting a small commission for getting photographers to take pictures appropriate for the website. She had negotiated a two thousand dollar contract with a woman to take pictures for the knitting site. Her take was two hundred dollars. It wasn’t much, but she could use it towards the rent.

Money was an issue. She was carrying a business loan and had to be careful with the money. For the next six months her cash flow would be outwards. Only when September arrived would she start seeing any income. Not only did she have business expenses, but she had rent and personal bills. She was paying herself a small salary, but it wasn’t enough. She was eating into her savings at an alarming rate.

Her former boss had called her a dozen times trying to talk her into returning to work for him. Initially he had offered her position back at a cut in pay, but now he was offering a fifty thousand dollar a year salary. It was too little and too late. By her calculations, her handful of calendars would net her nearly twice that. Of course, some of that money would have to be put back into the business for expansion.

Her apartment no longer looked like a place to live. She had papers and markups scattered over every flat surface. Handmade time lines were on the wall showing deadlines and critical paths in getting everything done on time. She carefully updated them when tasks were started and completed.

She was a little scared that something bad would happen, but with each minor success her confidence grew. She no longer had to wait for her boss to show up to sign critical papers. She signed them when they arrived and then took the necessary follow up actions. The fact that she was only doing thirty calendars rather then a hundred and fifty meant she wasn’t working as hard as when she had worked for her boss. Of course, she was putting in twice the effort on each calendar.

Intending to see what the photographers had sent her of their stock photographs, she opened her email. She was pleased to see that there were a dozen emails. It was a good sign that people were communicating with her. Nothing could be worse than silence.

Upon reading the most recent email, she nearly jumped for joy. A major bookstore chain with over seven hundred locations had ordered twenty copies of each calendar line for all of its outlets. That was over four hundred thousand calendars. She hadn’t expected to make that sale.

She got up from her chair and did a little victory dance around the apartment. With that one order, along with her other orders, her business was established. She could relax now and focus on getting the calendars put together in time to ship them. This was an important step on the path to success.

She sat down and composed a response that acknowledged receipt of the order. She gave a mailing address for sending the contract. She was so excited that it was hard to type. Her fingers kept missing the keys.

She had just hit the send key when the telephone rang. Surprised, she stared at the screen and said, “That was fast. I just sent it.”

She dug out her cell phone and saw that it was Max’s number. She answered, “Hello.”

“Hello, Selena. This is Marylou.”

“Hi, Marylou. How goes the website?” Selena asked.

She was pleased that Marylou had called. Now she would have someone to tell her about the order. It wasn’t Guy, but Marylou had become a good friend. They both shared a rather foul opinion of Guy’s wife.

“We just hit four thousand subscribers,” Marylou answered excitedly. The website featuring Guy’s cheating wife was getting so much traffic that they were having to increase the service contract. It was generating so much email that they were having a hard time keeping up with it.

“That’s great,” Selena said.

“We’re going to double it with the most recent video,” Marylou said.

It took them a couple of days to prepare each video for posting. They had to put a black bar over the eyes of Maggie’s lovers. Their lawyer had advised them to do that to avoid a potential lawsuit since they didn’t have the lover’s permission to post the video. They didn’t have the best video editing equipment that would make it easy to put the little black bar across the eyes so it took some time.

“Is it that good?” Selena asked.

Marylou said, “If you hate that bitch half as much as I do, you’ll be rolling on the floor with tears in your eyes from laughing. It is great!”

“Don’t leave me in suspense,” Selena said.

“The bitch was just informed by one of her lovers that she has gonorrhea. You have to see it,” Marylou said.

“Which one told her?” Selena asked. So far, Maggie had brought three different men into the bedroom. There had probably been more than that before Guy had caught onto her. There had been occasional references to other men.

“The old fart from across the street told her,” Marylou said. “It was hilarious. He’s wondering how he’s going to tell his wife. She’s wondering if she gave it to Guy. They are both about to have a nervous breakdown.”

“That is funny,” Selena said. She could just imagine it.

“Max worked on it all night. He just put it on the website,” Marylou said.

“How is Guy taking it?” Selena said.

Marylou said, “As you can imagine, he’s depressed. I think he’s about ready to file the divorce papers. I think living a lie is taking its toll on him. It must be horribly stressful pretending to be a loving husband when he knows what she is doing.”

“Poor guy,” Selena said feeling her heart breaking for him.

“So how come you aren’t out there cheering him up?” Marylou said.