MY PICTURE BOOK, now in its seventeenth printing, was going gangbusters. It had become especially popular in Holland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and France.
Autographed reproductions of my photos, prepared at Sparkle Snapshot in St. Louis, Missouri, and mounted on fine art board by an outfit in Sri Lanka (to reduce labor costs, Mr. Leiberman explained), were selling for more than five thousand dollars apiece plus shipping and handling.
Mr. Leiberman took care of everything for a mere twenty-five percent.
The bank across the highway from the Wal-Mart sent me a personalized rubber stamp to endorse my checks so my hand wouldn't get tired when making all my deposits. They also let me select twenty magazine subscriptions free from a list provided by the bank vice president's daughter, who was selling subscriptions to benefit her high school band.
I'll probably never get around to reading Cigar Aficionado, but as long as it didn't cost me anything, I figured I'd add it to the pile. I also checked off O, Oprah's magazine, and TV Guide, both for my mother, plus the new Reader's Digest, because it fit so neatly on the back of the toilet.
What I was really looking forward to receiving, however, was Kansas Real Estate Investor Monthly, because I had big plans percolating.
I was, by now, the richest kid in town. A dubious achievement given the population of Paisley, but worth mentioning.
Just as paper covers rock, and rock breaks scissors, and scissors cut paper, so does business activity mask loneliness. In fact, there is a point at which business activity masks everything, from ethics to love.
I had forgotten to write back to Maureen Balderson.
It had been weeks since the last exchange of postcards.
No, it was worse than that. I looked it up. It had been months. I'd been too busy getting rich to remember that the former girl next door was about to celebrate her sixteenth birthday.
Being rich does not guarantee to make you happy, but if you've figured out a way to make someone else happy, being rich definitely helps you express your feelings.
As it turned out, the Baldersons' house in Kansas City was part of a suburban real estate development adjacent to what only recently had been a farm occupied exclusively by wild rabbits and coyotes.
Now, of course, it was a prime site for a housing development for sale to any fool who would pay the asking price of sixty thousand dollars an acre, an outrageous sum for land by Paisley standards.
I bought all forty acres of it.
I also bought the Baldersons' house in Paisley. Then I arranged with Happy Turtle House Movers of Pittsburg, Kansas (down here, there is no h in Pittsburg), to have it moved to my land in Kansas City, where it was carefully situated on a pretty, partially wooded half-acre lot next door to the Baldersons' new house.
A little brass plaque on the front door read HAPPY BIRTHDAY SWEET SIXTEEN.
Mrs. Balderson was thrilled. Not only did she now have enough room to put away all the stuff she'd been buying at the stores in Kansas City, but she knew exactly where it all would fit.
Maureen Balderson was speechless, but her tears of joy said it all.
"Oh, Spencer," she finally murmured.
Her father put his arm around me and tormented me briefly with a half bear hug while Tim went tearing down the street after a rabbit that had been flushed from the bushes by all the activity.
As dramatic as this gesture was, however, it was only the beginning.
Within two months the entire town of Paisley, Kansas, had been rolled two hundred and fifty miles down the highway and planted like winter wheat in the fertile land of Kansas City's newest upscale subdivision, Paisley Paradise.
In the center of the development, in a beautifully proportioned red-brick Georgian building reminiscent of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, stood the Louise Franks Memorial Free Library of Paisley, Kansas.
Surrounding it were Mr. Heath's general merchandise store, the Honesty Gallery of Contemporary Art, Baskin-Robbins, Pizza Hut, PetSmart, OfficeMax, Subway, and Bed Bath & Beyond.
(Give me a break! Every real estate developer has to make a few compromises!)