The Gilded Cage book 1
- 2 years ago
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LenaChapter 20 free porn video
Lena’s turn:
Another trip to Dallas. Another bucket with almost a million dollars in it.
Randall ran down our list. Several times he paused, looked at a coin from the inventory.
“Last bucket,” he said, then he laughed. “You don’t realize what saying ‘bucket’ in relation to what you’ve laid out here means to me. I mean, people come in here with something like THIS,” he said, holding up a particular coin he’d said was a quarter million dollars, “and you’d think they had the British crown jewels. You come waltzing in here with a Tupperware tub.”
“What do you mean, ‘last bucket’?” Jay asked.
“I sort of misspoke,” Randal answered, “but we need to be more circumspect in putting these on the market. Like I said before, rarity keeps the prices up ... As long as we don’t hit the market with several of THESE,” he said, pointing to that coin again, “we’re okay. Sell too many, too fast, and we kill the goose that lays the golden egg. By overfeeding it.”
“I see,” Jay said, glancing at me.
“Don’t get me wrong – gold is gold. None of your coins are in such bad shape that they’re strictly bullion value, but this premium stuff, if we, say, hit the market with several at once, like that 1854-O, we knock the price down because they lose the rarity factor. Doesn’t mean that you still won’t get a bunch, but just not as much. However, if we catalog them and wait a year, we can expect to get that big price again.”
“I see,” I said. “So we really kind of need to catalog the rest and see what we might want to sit on?”
“That’d be my plan. I’d like to offer a certified grading on certain coins.”
“We’d like to do that. If you know what our best offerings are, you’re in position to sell when it benefits us all,” Jay posited.
“You retain possession,” Randall said. “After I do the grading, you take ‘em back. If you decide you need to liquidate some of them, you do that. I’ll work with you.”
“How about we sort of fifty-fifty that?” Jay asked. He went on to explain, “some of the more common and lower-grade coins, we sell those off. I don’t want to have ALL our assets in gold.”
“Unless I miss my bet with you two,” Randall said, “you’re putting some of your assets into that new house and you’ve got a diversified investment portfolio.”
“True,” Jay said. “But I’d like just a little more liquidity.”
“Okay,” Randall said. “The coins that are just a bit above bullion value, we can dump the daylights out of them with no problem. How much do you want?”
“Half a million,” Jay told him.
I still marvel at us talking about finances in the range of millions.
“That’s our ‘rainy day’ money,” I inserted. “It’s a crazy world out there. I read history books.”
“Then you know about money that doesn’t physically exist...” Randall started.
“Yes,” Jay said. “We’ve talked about that. I heard the horror stories about right here in the USA when storms took down the communications and people couldn’t use their credit cards and the ATMs wouldn’t work to give ‘em cash. We’re sort of hedging our bets on all those.”
“Gotta keep a big lump in investments,” I said. “Live money makes money.”
“I understand the thoughts behind your ideas,” Randall said. “We can work with that.”
“Good,” Jay said. “Now, next trip, we’re bringing the little gold coins – the eagles and half-eagles, and the silver. I think what we want to do with the silver is exchange the collectible stuff for more pedestrian values.”
“I’ve looked at your listing. You’re liable to do well on those, too, you know...”
“They’re ugly,” I said.
“Hundred and fifty years of dampness in a rotten leather bag sort of helped that,” Jay added.
“Nonetheless, we’ll wipe them off and see what we’ve got. Those pictures you took, they have me intrigued as well. Three, four thousand apiece for common dates in any kind of condition at all.”
“For silver dollars...” I said.
“Yeah. It’s crazy,” Randall stated, “But so many of the lower end silver coins were melted down in the big silver bubble in 1980, that they turned the market on its ear. Same thing with gold. In 1935 when it became illegal to own gold for most people, the government melted down huge amounts of coins, so the ones left are rare outside the actual number originally minted.”
“Crazy.”
“Yeah,” Randall said. “Skews the rarity factor something fierce because nobody knows how many got melted down. You folks’ll profit.”
We left Randall’s place with a promise to haul in the remainder of the cache within a week or so.
Took the back roads heading back home. I had to hit a few flea markets and ‘antique’ stores on that trip. My kitchen lacks the cookware that I grew up with – cast iron pots, mainly. I’d looked at the new ones on the market. They don’t hold a candle to Mom’s, and Mom got hers from HER mother. I found similar ones at some of those markets, but that’s another ‘collectible’ market that has gone nuts.
“Don’t even break a sweat, baby,” Jay told me. “The old stuff’s best and we can afford it.”
We want our kitchen done up right. Both Jay’s family and my family had the smaller kitchens in the old homes that we grew up in. Our kitchen’s big. Room for appliances. Good ones, too. If we’re gonna spend our lives here, then we’re going to do it right.
Let’s recap, then ... According to a somewhat obscure historical reference, I’m two out of three in the Kinder, Küche, Kirche of the traditional wife’s role. I’ve got our kitchen, I’ve got our church...
And at a church social, Jay and I are sitting there chatting with other members and watching the kids play. One of the families has a pair of four year old twin girls who are absolute dolls, that cotton-topped blonde thing that little girls do. They’re active and cute and just a little bit shy when they come up while I’m talking with their mom about dragging some Cajun recipes into the piney woods of central Louisiana.
Little Trina got there first, scooted onto her mom’s knee, leaving little Tracy looking a bit disappointed.
“Don’t whine, Tracy,” her mom said.
“I have a knee,” I offered.
Tracy scooted up onto my lap.
“You’ve got a friend for life, Lena,” Sophie said.
“I like ‘em like this,” I laughed. “At the end of the day, she goes home with YOU.”
“Yeah ... You and Jay, have y’all thought about it?”
“We’ve talked. We were planning on waiting until we got our lives in order...”
“Some people do that,” Sophie said. “But there’s always a reason NOT to do it. You’re young and healthy and you’d probably be a great mom.”
“Jay’d be a great dad,” I said. “You ‘n’ Scott need to come over next Saturday. We’ll do some food and let the kids play with the goats and I’ll get another view of Jay around kids.”
“You need to rethink that, Lena,” Sophie said. “Look over there...” She pointed. Jay was there with a couple of dads and some pre-teen boys, pitching a softball. “Guy needs a kid to teach...”
Now I’m thinking. When Jay and I had the ‘children’ talk, it was before I found that box with the backhoe. Since then, our lives have been this whirlwind and honestly, I never thought to revisit the subject. We darned sure built the house with kids in mind, though. Two empty bedrooms, one made up as a guest room, the other a receptacle for odds and ends. And a sitting room (who still uses ‘sitting rooms’? the architect has asked us) off the master bedroom that would certainly convert to a nursery for a newborn.
Jay and I had semi-consciously built our house with children in mind.
After the social, we went home.
“I had an interesting conversation today,” I said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Sophie Hall.”
“Oh, yeah. Scott’s wife. The twin girls. Six year old boy.”
“That’s the one.”
“What were you talking about?”
“Started out going over recipes. We need to hold ‘gumbo’ classes.”
“I’m sure you moved on past recipes, though.”
“Uh-huh. Jay, remember us talking about kids?”
“I do remember that,” he said. “I remember us talking about getting our finances stabilized first.”
“How stable is one point eight million in an investment account and a six-figure bank balance?”
“Pretty darned stable. I’ve been meaning to talk with you about the next step.”
“Next step?”
“Yeah. Lena, having a child is a big deal, you know ... all kinds of things come into play.”
“Thoughts. Yours.”
“You, my blonde-headed wife, are the one who’s gonna swell up for months, then squeeze a human being out of your cooch.”
“You make is sound so romantic,” I giggled.
“Then there’s this helpless little entity what’s going to require around the clock attention from us.”
“I understand that. I was a pro-grade babysitter, remember.”
“So I heard. And you took care of Denny. I attribute a lot of patience to you for that.”
“Are you trying to talk me out of it, Jay?”
“No. Absolutely not. I married Lena whom I saw as a fitting partner with whom to procreate and rear children. You and I talked about it BEFORE we got married.”
“We did.”
“We haven’t talked about it recently. Are you still...”
“When Tracy got into my lap today, something clicked, Jay ... I love you. You love me. We meant to be parents...”
“I love you, too. I was hoping you’d arrive at that conclusion without me having to kind of prompt you.”
“You’ve been thinking about it?” I asked.
“I have. I thought about it when we planned out the house. I saw you choosing features that I knew would suit us for having children...”
Jeannie
- 01.01.2021
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