Chapter 7 - The Room Above the Print Shop
Two weeks later I was standing in a four-hundred-square-foot studio on Langdon Street, holding a coffee mug, with nothing else in the room but a folding table, a Goodwill chair, and a window that actually opened toward the Green Mountains.
It smelled like ink and old paper from the shop downstairs. The floors were scratched hardwood. The radiator clanked when it kicked on. I loved it on sight.
The print shop owner was a woman named Frannie Dobbs. Mid-fifties, divorced, silver hair cut short, reading glasses shoved up on her forehead permanently, and a voice like she'd spent her whole life giving directions and expecting people to follow them.
She was pulling a tray of wedding invitations off the press the first morning I came down for coffee. She looked me over, the luggage-sized bags under my eyes, the wrinkled shirt, the laptop clutched like a life preserver.
"Morning," she said. "You the new tenant?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Frannie. You drink coffee?"
"Yes, ma'am."
That was it. No interrogation. No pity. No asking where I'd come from or why I looked like I'd driven through the night. Just coffee and a door left open.
May you like
I spent that first month knocking on every small business within walking distance. Restaurants. Galleries. A brewery with a logo that looked like it had been made in a middle-school computer lab. I offered branding packages at rates I could barely afford to charge.
Two clients signed by the end of the month. It wasn't much. But it was mine.
