“Beautiful! I rarely find them on the property.”
I followed Kate’s gaze more carefully and realized she was staring at a hummingbird, doing its distinctive swooping flight.
“The ruby-throated is the only hummer in Vermont,” she said dreamily. “And they’re attracted to the color red.”
“Ah,” I said. That explained why those glass hummingbird feeders I’d seen at the hardware store were always red. “He’ll figure out soon enough that the barn is not an enormous flower.” Kate didn’t laugh. I cleared my throat. “So . . . I’ll try to call Kevin Dunham again this week. But the thing is, he hasn’t returned my last couple of messages. I was hoping you’d bump into him in town.”
Kate sighed petulantly, still peering out the doorway after the bird. “But it’s not like we need the government’s rubber stamp to grow the best food on earth.”
At that I had to take a deep, cleansing breath through my nose, the way they teach you to do in yoga class. “That’s true. But we need organic certification to sell it,” I insisted gently. “You don’t mind getting paid for the best food on earth, I assume?”
She shrugged, tipping her dreamy face to the side as her gossamer hair slid down over her shoulders. Money seemed not to weigh very heavily on her mind.
I envied her that. But I needed her help nonetheless.
Two months ago I had hustled my family to Vermont for the big organic inspection. After three and a half hours of clapping along with Elmo, I’d sprung from the car, ready for an intense afternoon proving the wholesomeness of the farm and its wares.
While Luke and the boys had headed over to the pond to catch frogs, I tiptoed over to the cultivated rows of zucchini and inhaled the sweet smell of the earth. Sinking to my knees, I admired the arching stems and tendrils before me.
The impulse to be green and clean hit me like a ton of bricks when Jasper was born. Here was this brand-new, fragile person, and the one responsible for his care was unaccountably me. The dim sum and Starbucks muffins that had sustained me during college and long hours at work would no longer do. Clearly more care and attention to foodstuffs would be necessary. I didn’t want to mess up.
Later, when I began researching organic food trends I learned that the first organic purchase many women ever make is a jar of baby food. Just like me.
And now, out of the mere dirt right in front of me, vegetables grew. And I in turn would put those vegetables into food for children. And via another mysterious and miraculous process, their calories and vitamins and minerals would transform those children into bigger and smarter people. With more pride than I’d ever felt before, I’d sat at the edge of my field, awaiting the organic inspection team.
Forty-five minutes later, a battered VW bus finally rattled up the road. I rose as it eased to a stop beside the barn. An eternity later, the rusted door creaked open, releasing a billow of sweet-smelling smoke. Kevin Dunham stepped out, red eyed and bleary.
“Morning,” he’d said.
It was a quarter to three. “Hi,” I’d said weakly, wondering if there’d been some mistake.
He’d looked up at the sky for a minute, as if he’d left something up there for safekeeping. Then he stepped away from his van.
He eyed me unsteadily, saying nothing.
“Right. So . . .” I was at a loss. For support, I turned to my clipboard and the fourteen-page application I’d filled out. “Would you like to see our fertilizer sources first?”
“Lead on.”
I gave him the nickel tour. First I brought him over to our goat enclosure, explaining how we composted manure for fertilizer and straw bedding for mulch. “And here is”—I riffled through the papers on my clipboard—“the receipt for the supplementary feed we bought last year. Just a small amount from an organic producer in Brattleboro.”
I showed him our cultivated acres. “And those acres on the other side of the divide are fallow and will be ready for cultivation next year.” I prattled on about our cover crop of buckwheat and our anti-erosion plans.
Dunham didn’t ask a single question. To our rainwater-collection system and our well, he said, “Yeah.”
Uneasy, I handed over the application that had taken me so many late-night hours to assemble. “It’s . . . all in here.” I’d slaved over that document, converting acres to hectares, explaining adjoining land use. It was difficult to hand it all over to a man who seemed not to remember my name.
I should have trusted my gut.
“Thanks,” he’d said, and then headed toward his van. He put my precious paperwork on the passenger seat and then climbed in.
“Wait!” I’d said, in disbelief. It couldn’t possibly be the end of my inspection. He hadn’t even looked at the vegetable plants I’d dug up for him. And he hadn’t gotten closer to our soil than the edge of the plot. “Aren’t you going to test anything?” I asked. I could hear in my voice an echo of the straight-A high school student I’d once been. I was prepared for this inspection, damn it, and desperate to prove it.
“But testing’s not required. Organic certification is all about process, ma’am.” It was by far the longest statement he’d made. “The results, we don’t really look at ’em.”
The surprise must have shown on my face. Or maybe he woke up and realized he’d been hasty. For whatever reason, he decided that his next joint could wait a few minutes. “Actually, ma’am, I got a soil test kit in back, if you want to know how your mineral levels stack up,” he said. “But it’ll be extra.”
“Yes, please” had been my answer. My tiny little farm was the very model of clean living, and I wanted something to show for it.
He’d spent a few minutes putting soil samples into test tubes. Then he’d climbed back into the van.
“When will I hear from you?” I whimpered.
“Soon,” he’d said, backing out.
Two months had passed between that sunny July day and this lovely September afternoon. Luckily, small producers can legally sell their organic produce without certification. Since Kate and her brother had handily underperformed the five-thousand-dollar benchmark, this year we were in the clear. But a new season would soon be upon us. And I had big plans for Julia’s Child. I’d need that certification to make my business legit.
Kate, I noticed, was now holding the garter snake. They were having a chat. She whispered to the snake, and it flicked its bright red tongue in response. I waited for their private conference to end. When she put it back on the floor, I made my case one more time. “Please, if you see Dunham in town, ask him to call me. If he doesn’t come through soon, I’m going to have to hire another team of inspectors. And I know how you hate to have people tromping around in your fields.”
Kate made a face. “You won’t believe who I caught snooping out here last week.”
“Who?”
“Randy Biden.”
“The developer? Why?”
“I don’t know why,” Kate said with a stamp of her bare foot. “But I put up a ‘No Trespassing’ sign the very next day. I think he’s up to something.”
I shrugged off her paranoia. “Maybe he just wants to know if we’re really farming anything up here. Maybe he thinks if it doesn’t work out, he can approach me again next year and try to buy the land.”
She looked stricken. “You’d never,” she yelped. “Do you even know his latest scam? It’s just horrible.”
“Tell me,” I said. “But let’s step outside, where I can see the boys.” I walked through the barn’s open door, toward the shaggy little organic-fertilizer producers in the pasture. Wylie stood inside the split-rail fence. “Me a goat farmer,” he said as I climbed up to sit on the top rail. He patted the head of a small goat, who took the opportunity to gnaw on his jeans.
Jasper crouched at the other side of the corral. With a frown of concentration he pitched pebbles at a fence post. “Doozsh, doozsh,” he said under his breath as he strafed an invisible enemy.
Kate perched on the fence rail next to me. �
��So,” she began, her voice lowered conspiratorially, as if the goats were likely to repeat whatever she was about to tell me. “Randy Biden gets paid by EcoPass to plant trees!”
“Sorry?” I asked. Planting trees sounded like a good thing for a developer to do.
“Do you know what EcoPass is?”
I shook my head.
“It’s a carbon-offset company. They let people pay for their sins. If you feel guilty, say, about taking a cross-country flight, you can purchase vouchers from them. Then EcoPass puts your money into projects that offset the carbon you’ve selfishly burned in the atmosphere.”
“Okay. I’ve heard of that,” I told her. “They try to prevent methane gasses from escaping into the atmosphere . . .”
“That’s right,” Kate agreed. “But in Vermont, EcoPass plants trees. And Randy Biden is one of the people they pay to do it. We’re talking about a man who uses a bulldozer to clear trees from his building sites. He builds log homes. And then, when the project is finished, he plants some saplings around the property so it won’t look too ugly to sell. And EcoPass pays him to plant them!”
I burst out laughing, which made Kate furious. But I couldn’t help myself. The man was a genius. “Holy shit!” I said. “He’s getting paid to replace a few trees that he would have planted anyway?”
“Exactly.” Kate sighed. “I hope he burns in hell.”
“Mama! You said ‘shit,’ ” Jasper said, without looking up from his pebble-tossing game.
Of course I understood Kate’s outrage—I wasn’t deaf to the irony. How many trees did the man have to cut down for each log home? Forty? Eighty? He’d have to replant the entire state of Vermont just to break even. But you had to admire the developer’s pluck, not to mention his understanding of the way the world worked. Here I was, on the side of the “good guys,” fighting just to keep my head above water. Hell, if Randy Biden was also a certified organic inspector, I’d hire him on the spot.
“Oh, Kate, I’m sorry. But that’s why we need to get our organic act together. So we can win a round, like him.”
She was silent.
I climbed over the fence into the goat’s pen. “Boys,” I called, “it’s time to go back to the house.” I patted Wylie’s sun-warmed head. “Okay, pal. Let’s go say hello to the frogs in the pond.” I wanted to get back to the house and help Luke unload the car. I hoisted Wylie over the fence, despite his complaints, and began to lead him back down the path toward home.
“See you, Kate! Say hello to your mother for me.”
“Have a blessed evening,” she mumbled.
Chapter 6
Wylie and I had already washed and torn the lettuce together. Now, standing on a chair to reach the counter, he was peeling onions. I didn’t happen to need any onions, but Wylie didn’t know that. His little pink lips were set in concentration as he teased the papery skin away from a bulb.
From the other room, the phone rang. “One minute, sweetie,” I promised Wylie. Just so that there would be no misunderstandings, I carried my eight-inch chef’s knife, the one I’d been using to slice tomatoes, into the living room with me. “Hello?” My eyes went to the clock. It was a few minutes after five.
“Julia, it’s Marta!” She was out of breath.
“Hi, Marta. How were the deliveries? Did you put the flyers in the windows?”
“Yes! But there’s something I called to tell you.”
“Okay,” I said, wondering how Wylie was doing all alone in the kitchen. Our Vermont phone was old school, with a cord. I was tethered to the living room. The kitchen was oddly quiet. “Can I . . . Just one second. I need to check on . . .”
But Marta was having none of it. “Julia! Listen. When I was making the delivery to Luigi’s, I ran into Lizzie Hefflespeck!”
“Um, who?” Now from the kitchen came the sound of furniture scraping against linoleum. I stretched the phone cord as far as it would go, and Wylie came into view, pushing his chair toward the sink.
“One second, Marta,” I said, wondering how old my children would have to be before I could carry on an uninterrupted, adult conversation. “Whatcha doing, kid?” I called to him.
“I wash yettuce more!” he called back.
“Okay! Sorry, Marta. Now, who did you see?”
“Lizzie Hefflespeck, Julia!”
“Marta, I’m not trying to be dense. But I don’t have any idea who that is.”
“¡Dios mío!” Marta sighed. “She’s the blonde one on The Scene.”
Ah! So Marta was trying to tell me about a celeb sighting. But she’d picked the wrong girl to share it with. “The Scene?”
“You live under a rock, you know that? It’s a morning show with five hostesses. The one that fired Mimi Beener last year? For fighting with her cohosts?”
That sounded vaguely familiar. The bit of gossip about the famous comedienne feuding with other TV divas had briefly penetrated the harried bubble in which I lived. “Oh! Sure. So you saw one of them in Brooklyn?”
I heard the sound of the water running hard in the kitchen. Playing in the sink was a time-honored toddler distraction. I craned my neck to see Wylie holding a tiny fragment of lettuce under a torrential shower. The waste of water pained me, but I didn’t want to be rude to Marta.
“I didn’t just see her!” she shouted in my ear. “I met her—her and the little daughter. Because—you’ll never guess what they were shopping for!”
I perked up at that. “Don’t tell me they were looking for our product.”
“They were! They just didn’t know it,” Marta said smugly.
“Tell me!”
“It was Lizzie and the baby and the personal assistant. And Lizzie and the baby were dressed to kill. Lizzie was decked out in a dress, like Lilly Pulitzer maybe, and Ava had on a matching print but with . . .”
I bit back the urge to cut Marta’s description short. I was dying to hear whether the TV star fed her daughter a muffet, but I’d blown off work and left all the legwork to Marta, so I let her tell it her way.
“They were in Brooklyn for a photo shoot.”
“Both of them?”
“For a magazine—a ‘famous mother and adorable infant’ kind of spread. And the kid was hungry . . .”
“And you walked in with your delivery of muffets! Did they buy some? That’s great, Marta!”
“Chica, this story ain’t even half over. Lizzie was looking at the bananas, asking Luigi if they were organic . . .”
“She was not!” I laughed. Luigi’s Convenience Store was about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. It didn’t smack of gourmet choice.
“She was! And I latched right on to that mama like white on arroz,” she said. “ ‘Here’s your organic snack!’ I told her. ‘They’re called muffets, and I’m delivering them from our company, Julia’s Child, which makes healthy things for cute little girls like Ava.’ And then, because I’d recognized her, she dropped Luigi like a hot potato. And here’s the kicker, Julia. I had a fresh muffet in my purse. It wasn’t frozen—I was gonna eat it with my café con leche when the delivery was done. So I gave it to little Ava. And I told Lizzie that it was black beans and carrots, all organic, and she said, ‘Oh, I don’t know if she’ll eat it,’ and you know what happened, right?”
I smiled. Because I did know what happened. “She chowed it.”
“She did! And what do you think happened next?” Marta squealed.
“She bought a whole box of them?” I guessed.
“No way honey. I gave her a couple of boxes of them. And she was just so chirpy about everything. She loved the flyer with you and Wylie, ‘Oh, it’s so cute,’ and what a neat little company, and then she said the magic words.”
“ ‘Marry me’?”
Marta sighed. “No! She said, ‘I think we should have these on our show.’ ”
Fresh out of wisecracks, I finally shut up and listened.
“So her personal assistant, this twenty-year-old intern or whatever, is standing outside on the phone,
trying to get her a table at Per Se or something, and Lizzie, like, snaps her fingers and the girl comes rushing into the store. Lizzie throws the boxes of muffets at her and tells her to make a note that ‘We want this product on the show.’ So the girl is jamming that into her BlackBerry. And I make a real gushy good-bye to Lizzie, tell her how much you’d love to be on her show. And I get the personal assistant’s name as I’m leaving. So I can follow up on Monday, right?”
“You are a rock star, Marta.” And I meant it. I wondered if I would have had the wherewithal to throw myself at the celebrity the way she had. I probably wouldn’t have even recognized her.
“Damned straight. But my story’s still not over. I made it back to the office after the deliveries, by two thirty. Almost nothing happened all afternoon, by the way, and I was thinking of heading out a few minutes early. But at quarter to five the phone rings. It’s a producer from The Scene. Some musical guest canceled for Tuesday, and they want to know if we can be there.”
“Oh, shit! This Tuesday?”
“That’s right. So of course I told them yes.”
“Oh, shit!” sang Wylie from the kitchen.
“Jeez!” I said, still in shock. “Are we ready for national television?”
“You will be,” Marta said, cutting to the chase. “Leave it to me.”
“Oh, shit!” yelled Wylie again. “Wet!”
I dropped the phone on the sofa and ran into the kitchen. Lettuce and water were flowing in a green stream over the edge of the sink and down the front of the cabinet. Wylie had somehow wedged the salad spinner over the drain and overflowed the sink. I shut off the water, unwedged the spinner bowl, and ran back to the phone.
“. . . hair and makeup. We’re called for 9:00 A.M. The first segment starts at 10:00, but you’re slotted for 10:45,” Marta was saying. “We have all day Monday to get ready.”
One whole day. “Yikes. I guess I’ll be in early,” I said, the enormity of the situation just starting to sink in.
“See you then!” Marta said cheerfully. “I gotta call my sister now,” she said. “She’s still bragging about the time she saw Justin Timberlake walking down Broadway.”
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