Julia's Child (9781101559741)

by Pinneo, Sarah

  “Hey, Julia!” Marta beamed at me from across the room. “You used to be a bean counter. Now you’re a bean cooker!” She doubled over with laughter at her own joke.

  But I really wasn’t listening. I still had a bean counter’s attention to detail. And the missing organic certification had begun to nag me. It was the one point on which we were vulnerable.

  I dialed the Massachusetts number for Organiquest and asked for Mary. I needed to make sure that they’d inspected my farmland and could turn around my certification right away.

  “I was just going to call you,” Mary said.

  “You were?” I asked, happy to hear that my new organic inspector might know how to pick up a phone.

  “Yes. We inspected last Wednesday, and your application is good and complete. But we’ve found something awfully peculiar in your soil test results.”

  “Really? What do you mean, ‘peculiar’?”

  “It’s the nitrogen level. It would be difficult to imagine,” she spoke carefully, “how you could test at that level using the fertilization described in your application.”

  I was silent for a moment, trying to figure out what Mary was saying. “We used only goat manure this year. Before that, the land was used for organic dairy farming. My nitrogen is too low?”

  She cleared her throat. “No, it’s sky-high. That’s what’s so weird. As if you dumped a truckload of commercial fertilizer on it.”

  “But . . . that’s impossible!” Kate would never put anything unholy on her precious soil. She was a born-again, proselytizing organic zealot. It just didn’t make sense. Maybe they’d tested someone else’s field? “Mary, we can figure this out. Tell me exactly where you tested.”

  But after I listened to Mary, I had to admit that the folks at Organiquest were organized to a fault. She described my property in exacting detail. She’d carefully parked her car in our driveway and crossed the road for the inspection—all to avoid compacting the soil with her tires. She’d inspected the goat pen, the marked plots, and the compost pile. “But not the barn,” she’d said. “Only the outdoor hayloft. Listen, I’m just going to set your application aside for now.”

  “Set it aside?” That’s just what Kevin Dunham had done.

  “Just until you can take a look around, figure out what’s going on with the nitrogen,” she reasoned. “Something doesn’t add up. Why don’t you buy a kit from a garden center and do some tests yourself? With that nitrogen level, you should be able to duplicate my results. If you can’t, then maybe it would be worth meeting us up there to test it again. But I can’t really go further with this certification until we explain these numbers.”

  “But . . .” Panic rose up in my throat. “It was my understanding,” I tried, “that the soil tests weren’t really necessary for the certification. They’re extra, right? To help me learn about—”

  “That’s true, but now that we have these numbers in hand, something doesn’t make sense. So I think you need to take a moment and figure out why.”

  Mary was polite about it, but she was not about to solve my problem. Surely, she had no idea that my entire life hung in the balance.

  Ten seconds later, I was dialing Kate, and mercifully she answered. “Hello?” That dreamy voice was unmistakable.

  “Kate, it’s Julia Bailey,” I said breathlessly.

  “Happy harvest festival, Julia!” I supposed she was referring to Thanksgiving.

  “Um, thank you. I hope you had a nice holiday. Listen, Kate, I’ve got a little bit of a problem. The new organic inspector just told me that our soil tests came out a little funny. I was hoping you could tell me . . . if you put anything on the soil besides the manure?” I tried to make the question come out as innocently as possible.

  But Kate didn’t hear it that way. “Put anything on it? Are you serious? I don’t even like to walk on it, which is more than I can say for your team of inspectors. There were four of them tromping around out there last week!”

  “I’m sorry about that, Kate. But Kevin Dunham never gave me the paperwork I needed. I’m not sure if he’s up to the task of certifying a farm.”

  She sighed. “Poor Kevin. Such a talented boy. So sad.”

  “Talented?”

  “He’s actually an exceptionally knowledgeable organic farmer. He really is. But he smokes all the produce. If he’d only switch crops, then everything would come out all right. I just don’t know what to do for him.”

  I gripped the phone, wondering how to steer the conversation back toward my needs. “Well, the folks from Organiquest would be happy to certify us. But there’s a problem with our soil test numbers.”

  “Seriously, Julia!” she erupted. “You’ve got this all backwards. Why do you care what they think? Why do you want to let other people tell you how to farm?”

  The conversation was not going where I’d hoped to take it. “Kate, I’m sorry that you feel that way,” I tried. “The thing is—some people are very interested in helping me expand the business. Some investors. And they need a way to know—”

  “Investors? You mean . . . you’re going to sell out?”

  The words hung there in the air while I tried to think of what to say. “Kate, it’s not like that. I’m not selling the land, just the—”

  “Like hell you’re not selling it. You said you were different, Julia. But I should have known better. People with money are all the same. One year in, and you’re going to sell out to a big corporation for a quick profit. That’s disgusting!”

  Then she hung up on me.

  I closed my eyes, the phone still clamped to my head. I could picture my farmland, quietly sitting next to the big red barn, the wind playing gently over the yellowed grasses, waiting for snow. What the hell had happened there? And how could I figure it out by tomorrow?

  It was eleven in the morning. Luke was at work. Jasper was in school. And I needed to be in Vermont, right away. I stood up from behind the desk. Marta grinned into her own phone. “I’m going to transfer my shares of stock into a college fund for Carlos.”

  I put on my coat, picked up my purse, and left without saying good-bye. I didn’t want to scare her.

  As I trotted toward the subway, I reached Bonnie on my cell phone. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “But can you come up with something for dinner? I’m not going to be around tonight or tomorrow morning.”

  “Sure. Is anything the matter?”

  “I have to drive to Vermont for business. I’ll call the boys later and explain it to them myself.”

  Chapter 26

  There were 245 miles between New York and Gannett, Vermont. That was almost one mile for every thousand dollars I might earn on my sale of Julia’s Child to GPG. As I pressed my foot down on the accelerator on Interstate 91, I tried to imagine that the coincidence was significant.

  The drive had never seemed so quiet or so long. Without Luke, the kids, the complaints, and the Elmo, I felt lost.

  I tried the radio, but it was too chirpy for my mood. Instead, I tuned myself to an inner channel, one featuring several uninterrupted hours of self-recrimination. I measured myself against the hum of the motor and found that I came up lacking. I knew there’d been plenty of mistakes on the business end of things. That much was obvious. But I’d always been sure I had this one part right. My products’ purity had never been in question. It was brutally obvious, however, that now things were completely out of control.

  It was just as Luke, Marta, and my mother had been trying to tell me, or maybe worse.

  If I couldn’t find the answers fast, then the messy side of the business, my debts and obligations, would claim Julia’s Child for good.

  With each passing highway stripe, I said a silent prayer. Please, God. Let there be some explanation. Otherwise I’d brought everything to the brink, only to disappoint my family and Marta at the last minute.

  I needed to get to Vermont before dark, but I couldn’t do it without gas and at least a short break. I pulled off the highway in northern Massac
husetts.

  As part of my self-punishment plan, I visited the drive-through window of a fast-food restaurant. Then I pulled into a parking spot to make the necessary phone calls home. On Luke’s voice mail, I left a meandering message on the topics of my love for him, a problem with the farm, and hitting the road to inspect it.

  Then I dialed our apartment.

  “Heddo!”

  “Wylie?” I didn’t know he could reach the phone.

  “Mama! I having a treat. Wook!”

  Wylie had not mastered the idea that although I could hear him on the phone I couldn’t see him. “What are you eating, honey?”

  “Apple pie. I buy it with Bonnie.”

  “Apple pie? Where did you find that?”

  “At Old McDonald’s. I already eat the chicken and fench fies.”

  I cringed. I’d been out of town for just a few hours, and Bonnie had run for the nearest fast-food restaurant, completely against the family rules. It was bad enough that I had to poison myself on the road with partially hydrogenated oils. But there was no reason the kids should suffer.

  “Let me talk to . . .” I bit my tongue before I could ask for Bonnie. None of this was really her fault. There’d be no point fighting with her now. “Your brother,” I finished. “Let me talk to Jasper.”

  “Hi, Mom.” My big boy sounded so grown up on the phone. He had just started calling me Mom instead of Mommy. Coming from two hundred miles away, it broke my heart.

  “Hi, sweetie. I’m sorry I won’t be able to tuck you in tonight. But I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay. Hey—Mom. Do you know what a Happy Meal is? There’s a toy in it.”

  “Wow. Did it . . . make you happy?” I asked lamely.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Love you, honey.” I hung up, sad and confused.

  Having dined that afternoon only on a diet of reproach, I was starved. Sitting behind the wheel in the lonely parking lot, I unwrapped my cheeseburger and took a bite. It had been years since I’d had fast food. It was saltier than I remembered. But the burger had a pleasingly soft texture. Fillers, of course, gave it that texture. But it slid down easily. I tried the fries. They were tasty. So this was how the other half lived. I munched in silence, watching the sun sink lower in the New England sky and trying not to think.

  When my lips became salt puckered, I gave up on my McMeal. A tank of gas and several gulps of iced coffee later, I was back on the highway, speeding for the Vermont border.

  It was a lucky break that I didn’t get pulled over. Vermont isn’t heavily patrolled, but I’d never driven faster. I was racing the daylight, the GPG deadline, and my own sanity. At least I had the good sense to slow down when I left 91 for the curvy road to Gannett. I wasn’t too far gone to realize that a number of people required me to avoid wrapping the Subaru around one of the northern white pines along the route.

  The sun had already set, but the sky was still light when I finally gunned the motor up our dirt road. I pulled up hastily on the barn side of the road and hopped out of the car. I didn’t have a soil test kit, just a burning desire to see the dirt and touch it and try to understand.

  After two minutes of squatting over the clods of soil, the cold brown dirt still hadn’t spoken to me. Why had I thought it would?

  I didn’t know farming, yet I’d bought a farm. I didn’t know the food business either, yet that hadn’t stopped me from plowing straight in. At that moment it was painfully obvious that I should have remained a corporate accountant, employed and flush with cash. If I had, I might be standing in my kitchen at home right this minute, cooking the most glorious organic meal for my family. My kitchen countertops would be covered with the purest ingredients—purchased at the farmers’ market, of course, from somebody who knew what they were doing.

  Instead, I hunched alone in the darkness over dirt that was afflicted with some mysterious chemistry that I had no idea how to cure.

  My back was killing me. I rose to look around. The tall grasses of summer had fallen, brown and dried. But the earth was still soft underfoot. Several sets of footprints circled me. Kate must have seethed as the Organiquest folks tromped here, compacting the soil with their shoes.

  I followed the tracks to our second plot, marked off with stakes and string. The footsteps became muddled here, as if people had stopped to chat or perhaps to take a sample. Then they went on back toward the final planting area, mingling again near the goat enclosure.

  The light was nearly gone. I gathered my jacket more tightly around me, feeling the day’s urgency slip away. There was nothing to be learned from staring at some footsteps in the lonely dirt. Even the goats were missing. Kate housed them for the winter in a shed adjacent to the Barker farmhouse.

  A single set of heavy footprints diverged from the others and headed toward the barn. In the dim light, I followed it. We went around the corner, the footsteps and I, until we came to face the great sliding doors. That was a little odd, because Mary from Organiquest had mentioned skipping the barn. It was hardly a big deal, but I slid open the great red door anyway, wondering if the footsteps’ owner had done the same.

  Messy. It was my first thought when I saw all the little empty cartons thrown just inside the door. Who would leave such clutter? But as I stepped over them, I saw that they weren’t just any boxes. The package design was familiar from my childhood—its green and yellow colors, with the prominent juicy tomato on the front—my father had used this product every summer. He’d carefully mix the right amount of bright blue powder with water from the hose. He had drizzled it lovingly onto the roots of his beefsteaks and Early Girls. They were his only contribution to the family cuisine.

  Miracle-Gro.

  There must have been fifty empty packages. This simple commercial product—the blue stuff, of a peculiar color not found in nature—was the very last thing I expected to see in my own barn. But it certainly would make a soil test sky-high for nitrogen.

  But who would do this? And then leave the boxes here? Surely not Kate. And not the folks from Organiquest. This product, carefully applied by home gardeners all over America, might as well be arsenic. Once doused with an industrial fertilizer, three years would need to pass before the farm could be considered organic again.

  The only person who would want to pour Miracle-Gro here would be someone who did not wish to see an organic farm succeed on the hilltop.

  With that thought, my stomach clenched. I knew only one person who was against our farming here. One guy who would rather see condos than veggies. It was, I understood as tears pricked my eyes, a genius plot. To “poison” my land in a way that most of the world would consider harmless, except for me and a few other uppity organic purists.

  I’d been defeated, and by a guy who had simply to make one trip to the local nursery in his pickup truck. I put my head down on my knees and cried.

  Chapter 27

  I woke up to the taste of fire.

  The salsa. It had been too spicy. A few stale chips had been all I could find in the house to eat. That and plenty of beer.

  Bracing myself, I sat up and opened my eyes. Our Vermont bedroom swam before me. I sank back down onto the pillow and closed my lids again. Thank God I’d stopped short of Luke’s single malt scotch.

  The house was quiet—too quiet. I’d never slept there alone before. In spite of the familiar surroundings, I could have been on the moon. The silence was that deep.

  This is what my life will sound like if I totally fuck everything up. I turned the idea over in my mind. It was a sobering thought. So I sat up again, more slowly this time, and came face-to-face with a Playmobil figure on the bedside table. He stood there, all three inches of him, staring at me.

  He was a cop, I could tell by the uniform. But not an American cop. Playmobil was made in Europe, so he looked like the Eurotrash equivalent of a police officer. His tight plastic pants were tucked into his plastic boots. He wore an empty holster on his hip, because—pacifist that I am—I threw awa
y the tiny plastic gun during assembly, before it was spotted.

  Eurocop reminded me of something Luke had done a while back: a couple of times I’d found abandoned figurines like these lying in compromising positions on the bathroom sink top.

  I blinked back tears. The deep quiet and my sour stomach made even the stupid memory of Playmobil hanky-panky tear at me. I missed my husband terribly.

  Eurocop just stared.

  “We should hang out,” I whispered to him. “Neither of us was meant to be left here alone.”

  I heaved myself out of bed and into our tiny bathroom. It took a long time for the creaky plumbing to agree to pour hot water all over me. But when it finally did, I stood for a long time under the spray, piecing together the previous night’s disasters.

  It had not been my finest hour. I had called Luke in tears, blubbering with suspicions and defeat. But he’d been irritated with me for flying off to Vermont.

  “What now?” he’d asked, exasperated. “I thought you were supposed to meet with GPG tomorrow—and accept their offer.”

  His anger had startled me, although it was hard to blame him. I’d been out on the ledge over Julia’s Child for too long now. He wanted the drama to end.

  I pled my case as well as I could to Luke. Eventually, he calmed down and tried to help me sort it all out.

  Then I’d started drinking. I now felt the weight of the caloric imbalance. Through it all, I could not stop thinking about revenge.

  Calling the police had been my first inclination.

  “But, honey,” Luke had pointed out, “I doubt the penal code carries a statute against rogue fertilization.”

  That had sent my mind spinning through all the cop dramas I’d ever seen on TV. What could I peg him with? Trespassing? Vandalism? Those charges sounded more fitting for preteens with peashooters than for a builder with a vengeance. Conspiracy! That was more like it. But how? I wondered if fingerprints could be retrieved from moldering fertilizer boxes.

  I toweled off, letting loose another groan of misery. Pulling on the spare pair of jeans that I kept in Vermont, my mind was swamped with “if only’s.” If only I hadn’t gotten myself in debt. If only Kevin Dunham had just signed off on my farm in July. But then what? Then I wouldn’t know that the farmland was spoiled. Would that have been better?