Page 17 of Maggie’s Match

“It’s silly, but what if you purchased the land and then moved an already built building onto it?” Bridget said.

“What are you thinking?” Maggie asked.

“The old storage building,” Bridget explained. “It’s just a shell of a place, really. Around nine hundred square feet. You could move it onto the lot fairly easily. We’ve moved the pier-and-beam building ourselves once, it’s solid enough. Then, from there, you can make the inside whatever you want of it.”

“I don’t remember seeing it before,” Maggie said.

“We can ride out tomorrow and take a look,” Becca said, her voice laced with excitement.

“The cost of moving it would be less than the cost of building. You could purchase the lot and move the building with the budget you had already. I could easily loan whatever additional you needed for upgrades inside.”

“Mom?” Becca took her mother’s hand. “We couldn’t ask—”

“Nonsense. My inheritance has just been rotting away in the bank for years. Besides, your grandmother would love the idea of what you two are doing. You’re using some of her recipes already. She would have been so proud,” Bridget added with a smile.

Becca turned to Maggie. “I have a thought.”

“Okay,” Maggie said, feeling her heart race with the new possibilities. After all, she’d purchased the old gas station building in Fairplay and had turned it into a bakery. A shell of a building would no doubt be easier to turn into a bakery than the old gas station had.

“How about we change the name of the bakery once more. Instead of M&B’s”—Becca turned to Bridget—“how about Birdie’s? After my grandmother.” Becca turned back to Maggie.

Maggie smiled. “I think it’s an absolutely perfect idea.”

Chapter Seven

After dinner, Bryson showed Rick into his office just down the hallway from his bedroom on the main floor, and Rick realized just how big of a task he’d agreed to take on.

The large room off the front of the house didn’t appear to have been touched or cleaned in years. There were stacks and stacks of old newspapers, unopened junk mail, and flyers of all sorts piled on what appeared to be an old cherry wood desk.

He even spotted a very outdated computer and fax machine.

“A fax machine?” he asked Bryson, who only laughed and slapped him on the shoulder.

“Remember, you volunteered for the task.” He quickly disappeared.

“Shit,” he said under his breath.

After the first hour, Bent showed up with a beer, but when a stack of newspapers fell and tipped over his own beer, he disappeared again. He claimed that he was grabbing a fresh drink, but he never returned, leaving Rick to the task alone.

Rick wasn’t the most organized person. But working at his father’s clinic had taught him that you had to at least have the basic skills of neatness in order to conduct business. This was just a disaster waiting to happen.

Rick found a few unopened envelopes and, with Bryson’s approval, opened everything and organized it all. There were more than three thousand dollars in uncashed checks from utility refunds for the past quarter alone.

He set those in the pile he’d labeled “important” with a sticky note.

“How’s it going?” Maggie asked from the doorway.

When he glanced up, the look on her face told him that she was afraid to step foot in the mess.

“It’s going,” he said with a sigh, and rolled his shoulders. “How’s your revised business plan?”

“Probably going better than whatever it is you have in here.” She glanced around with a frown. “What are you doing in here?”

“Going pile by pile.”

Maggie was silent for a moment. “Need some help?” she finally asked.

He started to shake his head but then remembered she was the most organized person he knew.