“You might be right.”
Frank looked over at us then and gave Claudia a smile that could stop any woman in her tracks. He was head over heels in love with her, and it was a beautiful thing to see.
“I guess I won’t mind,” Claudia said. “Congratulations again. She’s really beautiful.”
“She looks just like Ryan.” I shook my head. “It’s like I didn’t even make her at all.”
“Damn Fisher genes.”
I shrugged. “Could be worse.”
“Oh, it could definitely be worse. The three of us are pretty lucky,” she said.
I agreed, even though I wasn’t entirely sure what I was agreeing to. Were we lucky that our kids might be as handsome as their fathers? Or were we lucky that we were the women that they’d chosen to love and spend their lives with?
Maybe none of it was luck at all. Maybe all of it was?
I had no idea, but I sure was thankful for all of it.
Diapers Are Dumb
Ryan
Frank pulled me aside at the hospital while everyone else was ogling the baby. “I know it’s not the best time to tell you, but I got some news.”
“What did you find out?”
He pulled at his hair, which told me the answer wasn’t good. “If that guy has the original deed to the land, then the one our lawyers drew up and Sam signed probably won’t be valid. An original documented deed with signatures supersedes all others that came after.”
My heart, which had been soaring on cloud nine only moments ago, came crashing down. “So we’re screwed? We have no rights?”
“Technically, it looks that way. But I’m not giving up yet.”
“Don’t,” I said firmly. “There’s got to be some kind of loophole.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
We three were all financially set for life, thanks to not only the success of the bar itself, but also to the location fees we received whenever the bar was used in a television episode. Yet it wasn’t about the money.
Sam’s Bar had evolved from a dream to a reality, and Frank and I made it happen together without anyone else’s help. And as soon as Nick joined us, it felt like even more of an accomplishment. The bar was about us as brothers being in business together, succeeding by pooling our individual talents.
Before Nick came along, we had allowed a few reality TV shows to film us for the free exposure it gave us. Nick was the one who changed all that, negotiating location fees for us anytime the bar was either mentioned or used as a shooting location. And if one of us appeared in the episode, we got a talent fee.
Those fees added up nicely over the years, continuing to earn us money without any effort. Sam’s had become a part of us, our heart, and Fishers didn’t walk away from the things they loved.
We had to figure it out.
• • •
The next ten days passed by in a blink. We still weren’t completely sure what the hell was going on with the original deed to the land or how this man could have gotten his hands on it. Frank’s information so far had been deemed accurate, but we still didn’t have any concrete information beyond that.
No one could find any records of Sam Sr. passing the land to a new owner, but that didn’t mean that it hadn’t happened. There were apparently hundreds of unorganized boxes of property transactions to go through by hand, and that required time that we didn’t have.
Because we had no way to get in touch with the scary dude who had threatened to take it all from us, we were at his mercy, which wasn’t something any of us were used to. By not giving us a way to contact him, he’d taken away our ability to negotiate or get more information to determine what it was he was truly after. None of us could figure out why he wanted to tear down the bar, although we never mentioned it after we talked about it at length one night.
Like typical men, we refused to ask the same questions over and over again. What was the point when we had no answers? We’d just be whining like a bunch of girls, and Frank wouldn’t allow that. So until we had a fucking solution, we didn’t discuss it; which meant we never talked about it because we had nothing to offer on the how-do-we-fix-this front.
Aside from the bar, things at home were going great. Well, as great as they could when you no longer got to sleep through the night.