“Andrea, I’m a lawyer. Every contract can be broken and a trust is basically a contract.”
“Not this one,” I said. “My trustee said my parents had it put together so that it can’t be broken.”
He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Why don’t you let me worry about that? Can you get the money?”
“It can’t be done, Graham.”
“Can you get it?”
“I can get it, but I can’t use it for this type of stuff. So I say we end the lease on the Porsche, apply that money to your credit card debt, and get our loan as we’d intended.”
Graham bit his lower lip and rolled his eyes. “You want me to give up my Porsche? I’m a lawyer, Andrea. I have to maintain a certain image.”
“But you won’t be a lawyer anymore.”
Thankfully, the banker cleared his throat when he came back to his desk. “Are we set to move forward?” he asked.
Graham still looked angry but he smiled as if nothing was wrong. “Of course,” he said. “Let’s get this ball rolling.”
Graham remained upset for the next two days. He traded in his Porsche and we applied the lease payment to his credit card bill. I also chipped in another $2,000. “I intend to pay you back,” he said. I wasn’t holding my breath. Nor did I really care. I’d never cared about money. I’d gotten by with virtually nothing my entire life, and now it seemed money just created problems.
The third day, Graham came home with a bouquet of flowers and an apology. I almost wished he hadn’t. Just when I thought I’d figured out his mood for the week, it would swing again.
“I’m sorry I’ve been such a jerk,” he said, handing me the fragrant bouquet. “It’s just that you really caught me out of the blue at the bank and I felt like I’d been put in an embarrassing situation, you know? I mean, here I was getting ready to take out a bank loan, and I’m supposed to be a lawyer, and I didn’t even know my wife had this massive trust.”
“I should have told you,” I said, though it was more to appease him. “It’s just, like I said, I didn’t think it would make any difference since we can’t use it.”
“Then why did you bring it up?”
“I was nervous. I didn’t want you to lie on a bank application and say you were going to be made a partner of the firm.”
He smiled, but it was patronizing. “Andrea, you’re such a Goody Two-shoes. Nobody is going to check on that, but it’s cute that you were looking out for me. And I get it. We can’t use the trust for the business, but hey, it’s nice to know that we have it, right? I mean, it’s like we have a net under the trapeze.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, suddenly leery of where he was taking the conversation.
“I mean we can use it if things get a little tight getting the business up and running, or to do things like travel—or buy a boat, you know, fun things as a couple. Wouldn’t it be great to have a boat? I mean we can use it like that, can’t we?”
“I suppose,” I said, wary. “The interest anyway.”
He leaned closer. “Do you forgive me?”
“Sure,” I said. What else was I to do?
“You know what I want to do?” He moved quickly, the way he did when he had a thought that excited him. I was praying he wasn’t about to say, “Have sex.”
“I want to go out to dinner and celebrate our new business. Someplace special.”
With Graham I was learning that “special” meant “expensive,” and I already knew whose credit card we’d be using.
Over the next two months the bank approved the loan, and Graham searched for space to rent and researched inventory. He’d been energized, upbeat, and excited like the Graham I’d met and married. He couldn’t get enough of me either. We had sex all over the loft, and in creative ways. I’d tried to be optimistic that the business would succeed, but my doubt grew when Graham told me he’d found a small shop right there in the Pearl District, which was one of the highest-rent districts in Portland—and that was saying something. I’d read an article that said, since 2015, Portland’s residential and commercial rents had shot through the roof. All the newspapers lamented how Portland was losing its identity as longtime residents and small businesses were forced farther and farther out of the city core. The rent on my loft had skyrocketed from $900 a month to $1,250 in just three years, and the space Graham chose to open Genesis was $23 a square foot. I tried to persuade him to open the dispensary in a more industrial area where the rent was $11 a square foot, where we would have plenty of parking, and where we would be farther away from the medical dispensaries, but Graham dismissed it.