Julia's Child (9781101559741)

Table of Contents

 

 

A PLUME BOOK

JULIA'S CHILD

SARAH PINNEO worked in finance for more than a decade before making the transition from breadwinner to bread baker. Her first book,
The Ski House Cookbook
, was published in 2007. Sarah writes about food and sustainability for lifestyle publications including the
Boston Globe Magazine
and
Edible Communities
.

PLUME

Published by Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Books (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Printing, February 2012

Copyright © Sarah Pinneo, 2012

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

 

Pinneo, Sarah.

Julia's child : a novel / Sarah Pinneo.

p. cm.

ISBN : 978-1-101-55974-1

1. Businesswomen—Fiction. 2. Natural foods—Fiction. 3. Motherhood—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3616.I577J85 2012

813'.6—dc22

2011014815

Set in Horley Old Style

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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For Mike, who was there at its inception.
For Rosemary, who yelled “push,”
and for Mollie and Denise,
who helped to feed and change it.

Chapter 1

T
hough I wasn't familiar with the neighborhood, St. Agatha's was easily found in the middle of a leafy Brooklyn street. With only a little hesitation, I grasped the ancient-looking brass knob and opened the door.

A half flight of stairs led downward, but on the third step my grip tightened on the banister. When I'd cold-called the chairwoman of the Park Slope Parenting Association to ask for the honor of addressing one of her Thursday coffee hours, I'd imagined a cozy handful of women chatting in the basement of the church.

Through the open doors I could see an impossibly large number of women and children. They knelt in groups on the carpet, baby blankets stretched between them, toddlers orbiting each cluster. An entire cavalcade of strollers was double- and triple-parked against one wall. It wasn't a coffee circle. It was a toddlerpalooza.

I turned and beat a hasty retreat to the safety of the sidewalk, groping with a clammy hand for the phone in my purse.

My only employee answered on the first ring. “Julia's Child makes the best toddler food in the world! This is Marta speaking. How may I assist you?”

“Marta? It's Julia.”

“Julia, it's five minutes to four! Are you lost?”

“No, I found the church all right. I just . . .” I cleared my throat. It didn't seem possible that all those people had come to hear me speak. “Could you double-check the date and time?”

“Why? Isn't there anybody there?”

The sound of Marta's sensible voice made me feel more than a little ridiculous. “Well, sure, but . . .” I could hear her rustling around on my desk, looking for the note. Our office is so small that our two little metal desks practically touch each other.

“Four o'clock, September 5. So go in there,
chica
, and knock'em dead. But listen, I'm going to have to turn on the voice mail and leave too.”

“Why? Do you have to pick up Carlos?” One of Marta's very few flaws was her shaky access to reliable childcare. She occasionally ran short of help to watch her nine-year-old son after school.

“No. The Mobster called. Apparently there was a power outage sometime today, and when he got there this afternoon, the freezers were off. Everything's back on now, but I thought you'd want me to go look at the product.”

“Oh,” I said quietly. That was very bad news. Our entire inventory was in those freezers. We needed that food for our small Brooklyn retailers and for a marketing blitz. I pictured all our hard work melting into a puddle.

“I'm going over there now to check things out.”

“Oh, Marta.” The full weight of the news continued to sink in, and the timing couldn't be worse. “We need that food for the trade show!”

“Hmm,” Marta said with unmistakable hesitation. “We'll see . . .”

“Marta? What do you mean, ‘We'll see?' ”

“Julia, they're waiting for you. Go and do the coffee hour, and we'll talk about it afterward.”

“Talk about what?”

She sighed. “I opened the mail after you left. The trade show returned your check. There's a letter that says our company doesn't meet the show's . . . Hang on.” There were more sounds of paper rustling. “ ‘Annualized gross revenue' cutoff.”

“Those
bast
—” I swallowed that last syllable just as two young mothers pushed their strollers past me toward the church door. I moved a few paces up the street and lowered my voice. “No kidding we're small. That's
why
we need the trade show!” It was the only way to meet the national grocery buyers who would not take my calls.

“Chin up, Julia. We'll get through this. Not everything is going wrong.”

“It isn't?”

“Well, for one thing, this call has lasted at least two minutes without your phone dropping me. And more important, you are about to preach the gospel of Julia's Child to a bunch of hippies just like you.
Right now
. So go inside and tell the über-boobers of Brooklyn just how terrific we are.”

“Okay,” I whispered.

Marta hung up, and I wearily turned to face the church once more, but my confidence was sapped. It had now been a year—a year!—since I'd hatched Julia's Child, with the crazy idea that I had something the rest of the world needed. But I was still nowhere near breaking even. The wheels of commerce were stuck deep in tiny orders, misbehaving appliances, and brand-new opportunities for public humiliation.

Beside the church door stood a statue of St. Agatha. Her head was tipped gently to the side, stone palms open in a gesture at once calm and forthright. “Patron Saint of Fertility, Families, and Peace” was inscribed at her feet. What I needed was the patron saint of stage fright and poorly funded business ventures.

Just then another mom came jogging toward me, red hair flying. Good manners prevailed over cowardliness, and I opened the door for her and stepped inside.

“Thank you!” she gasped. “I hope I'm not late.”

As she passed by, I observed an infant napping in a carrier on her front
and
a toddler slung in a pack on her back. I'd had no idea that combination was physically possible. The rear of the backpack was plastered over with bumper stickers. “Eat More Kale” suggested one of them. “Make Dinner, Not War” commanded another.