Julia's Child (9781101559741) (29 page)

“Okay,” our lawyer said. “I'll add veto power . . . changing ingredients.” I could hear her scribbling. “Do you ladies have any questions so far?”

“I have one,” Marta said. “Do the benefits kick in right away?”

“You're pari passu with the other employees of GPG as soon as you sign. That usually means health and dental immediately. The 401(k) plan might start after a few months, though. Any more questions?”

Marta shook her head.

“I think that's all,” I told Nina.

“Okay! So let's review the contingencies now, and then we'll be just about done.”

“Contingencies?” Marta asked. She had received her own set of documents over the weekend, but I imagined she'd gone starry-eyed from the numbers on page one. It was doubtful that Marta had read all the way to the end.

“The group has given itself a couple of loopholes that would allow it to cancel the contract. The first contingency refers to product-packaging claims. GPG reserves the right to declare the contract null and void if any of Julia's Child product packages contain information that is untrue or misleading.”

Marta harrumphed. “We are as pure as the driven snow.”

I laughed. “You are not.”

“But the product is,” she argued.

Then I felt a pain in my chest, like indigestion. I stopped laughing as I remembered the great vanilla caper. That made for at least one batch of organic muffets that wasn't strictly by the book.

There was also the farm.

I halted my swivel chair to think it over. Luckily, I'd already asked the new organic inspectors to step in. Because if the farm certification wasn't complete, I could not legally claim that the muffets were organic. And a stickler might find the word “organic” on every package of muffets to be . . . How had they put it? “Untrue or misleading.”

I would call the organic inspectors immediately. “Is that all, Nina?”

“There's one more thing here. The terms of this contract will prohibit Julia from using her name again on a food or children's product.”

That was easier. “So if it doesn't work out with GPG, I can't quit and start a company called Julia's Other Child?”

“That's what they're driving at,” Nina cautioned. “But this clause is far too broad,” she scoffed. “I'm going to change the language to refer only to your first name.”

It was hard for me to imagine a world in which it could possibly matter. As if I'd have the energy to ever try to start another company from scratch. “Thank you, Nina. What do we do next?”

“Sit tight while I talk to their lawyers about some of this language. Are you going to make a counteroffer on the price?”

I chewed on my lip. “I really don't know.”

“Think it over, and I'll be back in touch at the end of the day.”

I hung up, pondering the question. “Luke thought it wouldn't hurt to try to get them to raise their offer a little.”

“Really?”

“He said that 285 sounded like it was just begging to be rounded up to 300.”

“So are you going to ask them for 300?” Marta admired her manicure.

“I really can't decide. Does only a sucker say yes to the first number? But of course I have no leverage. I can't really pretend I'd walk away at 285.”

“You're the one who used to work on Wall Street.”

I shook my head. “In the accounting office.”

“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

T
here 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 Massachusetts.

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.