“Baron!” A petite, elegant woman stepped up to Baron’s side and swatted him on the arm. “Are you giving that poor girl a hard time?”
“Zoey,” Baron said, “meet my better half. Georgia, this is Henry’s friend Zoey.” He turned to Zoey and said in a confidential whisper that was loud enough to hear five tables away, “I can’t figure it out. She stands around forever, gawking at the same pictures she gawked at last time we were here. Like they might’ve changed when we weren’t looking?”
The woman ignored him and looked at Zoey as she slipped onto Henry’s vacated stool. “Baron comes for the gab,” she said. “I come for the art. Pleased to meet you, Zoey.” She put out her hand and delicately shook Zoey’s.
Zoey laughed. “I come for both, I suppose. And the coffee.”
“Oh, yes,” Georgia agreed. As Baron dug into his zucchini bread, she blew on her hot espresso to cool it. “That Helena. She’s something.”
“If you don’t mind my asking,” said Zoey, “how do you two know Henry?”
“Well,” said Baron before his wife could reply, “now, that’s an interesting story. Musta been, let’s see now . . . fifteen years ago?”
“Eighteen,” put in Georgia.
Baron shrugged. “Yeah, eighteen, maybe; anyhow, a good while back. Economy was up, oil business was great, times were golden. Living the good life. Fancied myself quite the sharp businessman. King of the Oklahoma fields. Master of the universe. In plain language, I was being an idiot. The real financial brains were over here”—he gave a sideways nod, indicating Georgia—“but I was too stubborn to see it.” He tilted his head toward his wife. “Right, darlin’?”
“No comment,” said Georgia.
“Down in Texas they have this expression,” Baron went on, “ ‘Big hat, no cattle.’ All show, it means, and no real assets to back it up. That was me. I got way overextended.” He nodded sideways again at Georgia, who was taking tiny sips from her espresso. “And ’cause I dragged her with me, I guess it’s fair to say, we got way overextended. Economy took a turn. Suddenly the oil business wasn’t so great and times weren’t so golden.”
He looked over at Henry, who was now up front at the counter, busily engaged in brewing coffee drinks for customers. “He tell you the one about how you make a fortune?”
“One dollar at a time,” Zoey replied.
Georgia spoke up again. “Turns out, that’s also how you lose a fortune.”
“Yep.” Baron nodded, then looked back at Zoey. “That first million, you know?” He shook his head. “It’s the toughest to earn—but it’s the easiest to blow, and you don’t even know you’re doing it till it’s long gone. Wonder why that is.” He shrugged. “Guess it just is.” He sighed.
“So one day I’m sitting in the doc’s office in my skivvies, and he’s messing around with his machines and stethoscopes and whatnot, listening to my heart and such, and he clears his throat and says, ‘Baron, I’m gonna tell you something, so listen up, hear?’ And he tells me if I don’t quit drinking, smoking, and eating ten pounds of hog a day, I’m gonna die.
“I say, ‘Don’t sugarcoat it, Doc. Tell me how you really feel.’
“ ‘Baron,’ he says, ‘you got a choice here. Your vices, or your life.’
“So I sit there on his damn table, looking at him for a full minute. Finally he says, ‘Well? You gonna say anything?’
“ ‘Gimme a minute here!’ I say. ‘I’m thinkin’ about it.’ ”
He threw his head back and roared with laughter, so much so that a few of the customers up front turned to take a discreet look at what the disturbance was. A few others, seated at various tables nearby, just chuckled without looking over. Zoey got the sense that these were regulars who’d all heard Baron’s stories before.
“And I did think about it, too. Thought about it for a few months. Didn’t actually do anything about it, but I thought about it. Mostly what I thought was: Are you kidding me? Quit red meat? Quit smoking? Quit the cocktails? Git outta here. Not that I was a problem drinker, especially. Just a problem everything. Eighty pounds overweight and eight tons overconfident. It was a contest to see which would collapse first, my credit or my marriage.”
“Or your heart,” put in Georgia.
“Oh, right. Forgot about that.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Probably forgot about your quadruple bypass too.”
He chuckled. “Oh, right,” he said again. “That.”
Zoey loved the way they played off each other, like a seasoned comedy duo. And these two were old enough to be her parents. When was the last time she’d seen her parents laugh?
“Baron was here in New York on business,” Georgia said, “when he had a massive heart attack. By the time I flew up from Tulsa, he was being prepped for surgery.”
“Sweetheart?” Having not spoken for a full ten seconds seemed to make Baron antsy. “I’m gonna nose over there and see if I can sniff out a fresh cup of coffee. Zoey?”
“Thanks, but I’m fine,” said Zoey.
Baron lumbered off in the direction of the order counter. Zoey turned back to Georgia. “So he was being prepped for surgery,” she prompted.
It took a moment for Georgia to go on. “We—” Suddenly Zoey realized the woman’s eyes were filling with tears. “We almost lost him. Stubborn old turkey.” She laughed and wiped one eye with her tiny coffee napkin. “And he wouldn’t listen to anyone. Not the doctors, not his wife, not even our daughter.” She took a deep breath and then a sip of her espresso. “But he listened to Henry.”
“To Henry?” Zoey was trying to picture how the hospitalized Oklahoma oil tycoon and Brooklyn coffee shop morning-shift manager would have crossed paths.
“Yes,” said Georgia. “We couldn’t travel home, of course, not right away. Even after Baron was out of the hospital, we had to stick around for a while. ‘Don’t make any plans to leave town,’ as they say in the movies.” She gave another quiet laugh. “We started poking around the Brooklyn art galleries. Stopped in here one day for coffee, stayed for the photographs on the walls. Met Henry. He and Baron hit it off. And right away Henry started talking sense into him.”
“About money?”
Georgia smiled. “About food. Lifestyle. Survival, really. I remember the first time he said, ‘You build your health the same way you build your wealth, Baron.’ ”
The two women spoke the next line together in unison:
“One bite at a time.”
Georgia gave her a warm smile. “And Baron actually listened.” She shook her head. “Thank heavens for minor miracles. The money part came soon enough, though. Specifically, after we got the hospital’s final bill. Now, that nearly put me in the cardiac unit.” She looked at Zoey. “Did I hear Henry say, ‘You’re already rich, you just don’t know it yet’?”
Zoey nodded, thinking, Wow. This woman heard everything.
“Well, for us it was exactly the opposite. We were already broke and just didn’t know it yet. Sure found out, though.”
She paused for another tiny sip, then looked at Zoey again.
“I had no idea how overextended we were. I’d always let Baron handle the finances. It wasn’t until he was flat on his back in post-op that I started opening the mail myself and seeing where things stood. Which was that we were just about wiped out. All our homes deeply mortgaged. String of maxed-out credit cards as long as the Ozarks—and we’d been making nothing but the monthly minimum payments.”
Zoey flinched. Making minimum monthly payments—that was the patented Zoey Daniels method for credit card management.
“I knew this was bad,” Georgia continued. “What I couldn’t understand was how we’d gotten to that terrible place. One day Henry explained it to me. ‘Georgia,’ he said, ‘if you owe $20,000 in credit card debt and you’re only making the minimum monthlies, it will take you more than eighteen years to pay off your balance—at a total of more than $46,000.’
“I nearly fainted. That was more than twice what we’d put on that card in the first place!”
“Wow,” said Zoey.
“And that was just one card,” said Georgia. “To reach the hole we were in, you have to multiply that by several orders of magnitude. The miracle of compound interest. You’ve heard Henry talk about that, too, I imagine?”
Zoey nodded.
“Well, it cuts both ways. It’ll work for you, but it can just as easily work against you. Debt can compound, too, and once it starts, it can grow pretty fast and get pretty scary.” She shook her head. “I’d thought we were doing fine. We weren’t. We were very big hat—very no cattle.”
Zoey’s mind jumped back to that strange ad image she’d seen on Monday morning of the boat stranded in the desert.
If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not like where you end up.
“So, what did you do?” she said.
“Well,” said Georgia, “Henry helped us figure it all out, bit by bit. Sold off our ridiculous mansion in Tulsa and both vacation homes. Didn’t get much out of the sales, once all the loans were paid off, but at least it was something. The balance left us just enough for a small down payment on a little condo here in Manhattan. We never did go back to Oklahoma. And bit by bit, we started rebuilding.
“When Baron quit smoking, we discovered it paid, as Baron put it, unanticipated dividends. Not only did the man not die, it also knocked quite a chunk off our monthly expenses.” She laughed. “You’ve heard Henry talk about his latte factor?”
Zoey nodded—and made a mental note to herself to ask Henry about that. She still didn’t know what it meant.
“Well,” continued Georgia, “Baron called it his cigarette factor. And the cigars!” She waved her hand in front of her face as if blowing away a cloud of noxious fumes. “When he quit those, he felt like a new person within a month. The hacking and coughing went away—and there was one more leak plugged in the hull of our money boat.
“We stopped using our cards. Took a few years to pay them off, but we did. Started buying only used cars. My momma used to say, ‘When the going gets tough, the tough have cash.’ ” She smiled. “That was her motto: ‘Buy used—and pay cash.’ ”
She took one last sip of espresso, then set her empty little ceramic cup down.
“Tell you what else,” she said. “Henry not only saved our finances, and probably Baron’s life, too, but he also saved our marriage. Because we started talking about money. Not arguing about it—actually talking about it. Figuring it out together.
“Money just about tore us limb from limb. And money became the glue that put us back together.
“You married, darlin’?” Georgia asked. Zoey shook her head. “Well, remember this for the future: money is the biggest reason marriages fail—but it’s not money itself, and not even the lack of money. It’s the lack of talking about it and working it out together.
“I will never forget the first day we sat down and had our first honest talk about money, about our lives and our future. About what we both truly wanted and what steps we needed to put in place to get there. At the time, we were broke as church mice. But sitting there at our kitchen table, talking with him, heart to heart?”
She smiled.
“As far as I was concerned, I was the richest woman in the world.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“Anyhow, we’ve been coming to Henry’s place ever since. Not long after we met, Henry made a good-sized investment in the energy company where Baron works, and now the two are constantly gabbing about some new technology or other— What? You okay, darlin’?”
Zoey suddenly looked as if she’d heard a gunshot. A good-sized investment, Georgia had said. A good-sized investment? Henry? Zoey’s mind was racing. “Wait. You said, you’ve been coming to Henry’s place ever since? You mean Henry runs this place?”
Georgia reached out and patted Zoey’s hand. “Darlin’, Henry owns this place. He started it.”
“Georgia?” It was Baron, back at their table and tapping the face of his wristwatch with his forefinger.
“Right,” said Georgia, getting to her feet. “Have to meet our daughter at the airport. Next week, Henry!” she called out as the couple made for the door. “So nice to meet you, Zoey!”
Staring motionless at her latte, Zoey didn’t even look up.