Seeing the look on Sunny’s face when I gave her a pretty dress, made just for her, had somehow opened up my world, made me think that I really did have something to offer, something that mattered. I knew my company had to make a profit to make the idea viable, but donating a dress to a woman in need for every dress we sold, that was my dream.
“Yeah, and I get that,” he said when I finally took enough of a breath. “But you keep talking about what you want to do, and I’m telling you what you can do. If you’re serious about making that dream a reality—getting to the point where you can actually afford to donate thousands of dresses in a given year—then you need to plow your profits right back into the business. This can’t be a hobby, Grace. If you’re serious, you’re going to need to buy equipment, hire employees, rent warehouse space, build a website. . . .”
When I started arguing with him again, he raised his hand to cut me off and said, “Grace. Follow your heart, but bring your brain. That’s the only way this works. First make your company profitable, then make it philanthropic.”
I didn’t like hearing that. At. All.
But the look on Luke’s face told me he didn’t like saying it either. He wasn’t trying to squash my dream. He was just trying, honestly and at the risk of ticking me off, to give me his very best advice, based on his experience. I didn’t like it, but I’d be stupid not to listen.
“Okay,” I said at last, “thinking with my head and my heart—you said that the philanthropic part of the mission was what would help me stand out from the competition. So doesn’t eliminating that element also mean I’m eliminating a potential advantage in the market?”
“Well, yes. Potentially.”
“Then what about starting smaller? Donating one garment for every two sold.” He shook his head. “Four? Five? Ten?”
“How about every hundred.”
I grinned. “Okay, now you’re just being cheap. But, seriously, what if I use a percentage of each sale to make donated clothes? That could work, couldn’t it?”
He admitted that it could, but said the difference between success and a pipe dream would lay in figuring out the right percentages. After some discussion that sometimes verged on argument, we came up with a system of graduated donation levels that Luke thought could work—two percent of the first thousand, three percent for up to five thousand, five percent up to ten thousand, and so on, until the company was strong enough to support the one-to-one donation goal.
“But it’ll probably take five or six years,” he said. “Plus every ounce of energy you’ve got. And even then, it might not work. Are you sure you’re ready for that?”
Was I?
Five or six years was a long time. But, one way or another, those years were going to pass. Why not spend them doing something that mattered? Something I believed in? And sure, it was a long shot, I knew that. Even if I worked as hard as I knew how, the chances of my success were pretty slim. But, if I failed, at least I’d have failed trying to do something I believed in, right?
But it was a risk. The biggest risk I’d ever considered taking in my life. Was I ready? If Jamie had been there, sitting next to me, what would he say?
“Yes,” I said. “One hundred percent. All-in.”
I picked up my pen and looked at Luke.
“Now, what else?”
Chapter 28
Grace
I put off starting work at Café Allegro until after my opening day at the Saturday Market. The only way for me to have enough dresses ready in time for that first day of sale was to sew from daylight to midnight, seven days a week. But when Alex qualified for the regional finals in cross-country, I took a couple hours off to go to the meet and cheer him on. Nan came too. Unfortunately Monica got caught in traffic and missed the start of the race.
“Where is he?” she puffed, winded and a little frantic-sounding after jogging from the parking lot.
“There,” Nan said, pointing to a brownish head in a sea of other heads on the far side of the field. “In the middle of the pack.”
Monica squinted in the same direction as Nan’s finger, then swung her fist over her head and shouted, “Go, Alex! Woot-woot! You can do it!”
When he rounded a corner and disappeared she turned toward us. “He looked good, don’t you think?”
“Really good,” I said.
“I couldn’t run that fast even if something was chasing me,” Nan said.
Monica, still winded, laughed. “Yeah, I know what you mean. He’s had a really good season, but only the top three will qualify for state, so it’d basically be a miracle if he made it. But you never know.”
Bob and the other coaches, who had been standing a few yards down the course, cheering their runners on, started trotting toward a grove of trees on the opposite end of the field, where, presumably, the runners would reappear in a few minutes. Spotting Monica, he swept his arm over his head and waved. She waved back.
“Bob has a strategy,” she informed us. “He wants Alex to lay low in the middle of the pack, reserve his energy, and then break hard in the last half kilometer. Alex has a heck of a kick. The tricky part is figuring out when to use it. Anyway, thanks for coming. This is kind of a big deal for Alex.”
We sat down on a nearby bank of bleachers and Monica’s smile faded.
“I can’t believe I missed the start of the race,” she said, rubbing her forehead as if she were trying to scrub the furrows from her brow. “I left the restaurant half an hour early to make sure I was here in plenty of time.
