How much would you pay to keep your dog forever?
Opal had the answer laminated and taped to her front counter. Cat, $1,400. Small dog, $1,900. Labrador, $2,800. Birds by quote. Below that, in red marker: "Current wait: 9 months."
Her shop sat at the end of a gravel lot behind a feed store. Inside, the walls were wall-to-wall deer. Forty heads, maybe fifty, all glass eyes and polished antlers, every one tagged with a hunter's last name and a pickup date. That was the old business. It paid the bills from November to January and then went quiet.
The new business hummed in the back room. A freeze-dryer the size of a vending machine, running a fourteen-week cycle on six cats and a beagle. Next to it, a chest freezer with a sheet of masking tape across the lid. Names in Sharpie. Pickles. Duke. Mr. Fig. Lulu. Seventy-four of them, each with the date the owner paid.
The oldest tag said last August.
"Everybody wants them back by Christmas," Opal said. "I can do maybe eighteen."
She needed a second dryer. The maker had one on the floor for $38,900, and the price went up $6,000 on the first. She wanted $40,000. Her spring deposits ran about $21,000 a month. November hit $63,000. Honest paper, just shaped like a mountain.
My phone rang while I was reading the tape. It was Hollis, the underwriter at the funder I'd sent her file to. I put him on speaker so she could hear the yes.
"Love this one," Hollis said. "Seventy thousand at a 1.42."
"She asked for forty."
"She's leaving money on the table. Look at her November. That's a monster month."
"That's deer season. It's eight weeks long."
"Seventy or nothing, my friend. Desk minimum on this vertical."
"Since when?"
"Since this morning."
He hung up before I could ask what vertical he thought dead cats were.
I did the math on the back of a deer-tag receipt. Seventy thousand at 1.42 is $99,400 back. Over 140 business days, that's $710 a day. In March, when her deposits dropped to twenty-one, that was about $14,900 a month going out of a $21,000 account. She'd make payroll in February. She would not make it in April.
My cut on the seventy was $7,000. On the forty, it was four.
I turned the receipt around and slid it across the counter. Opal read it twice. Then she pulled out her phone and slid that across instead.
A text, forty minutes old. From Hollis.
"Your broker is slowing you down. I can fund 70 tonight, direct. Skip the middleman, skip his fee."
I felt my face get hot. The deer stared down at me like they'd seen this before.
"There's no fee you'd be skipping," I said. "It's built into the factor. He just keeps my points."
"I know," Opal said. "I wanted to see what you'd tell me."
"And?"
"You showed me April." She tapped the receipt. "He showed me tonight."
I went out to my car and called a small funder I'd used twice, a woman named Bettina who answers her own phone. Forty thousand at a 1.34, $53,600 back, $383 a day over 140 business days. Bettina didn't care about verticals. She asked for a photo of the freezer and the dryer quote.
I sent both. She approved it in thirty-one minutes.
Opal signed on her counter, under the laminated price sheet, while a buck with a broken tine watched from the wall. The wire was booked for the morning. The dryer would ship before the first.
When I came back in for my pen, she was standing at the chest freezer with the roll of masking tape. She tore off a fresh strip, uncapped the Sharpie, and wrote in neat block letters.
HOLLIS.
She pressed it onto the lid at the very end of the line, after Lulu.
"No rush on that one," she said, and closed the freezer.