Skipping a Beat (9 page)

“You like it?” He dropped his terrible French accent.

“It’s tangy and … and so
fresh,”
I said.

“Right! That’s it exactly,” he said, the words tumbling out of him in a torrent. “My professor Raj knows one of the former beverage buyers for Whole Foods. She came in and did a guest lecture at Georgetown a few years ago. He thinks he can get me a meeting with her. Here, try this one.”

I sipped them all—the lemonade was still my favorite, but Berrywater was a close second—then I started dinner while Michael squeezed into our galley kitchen with me.

“It’s not just the ex-buyer,” he explained for the tenth time as I swirled spaghetti around in boiling water. “She’s a link in the chain. If she likes my product, she might be able to introduce me to her contacts.”

“She will,” I said. “She’ll like it.”

“All I need is two minutes with the right person,” Michael continued as I drained the noodles in a plastic colander in the sink, leaning over the hot rush of steam to get the poor woman’s version of a facial. Later I’d slather half an avocado on my face to complete my beautifying and make Angelina Jolie shake in her shoes with raw, unbridled envy.

“I told you what
Natural Foods Merchandiser
reported, right?” Michael asked as I handed him a spoon and pointed him toward the spaghetti sauce simmering in a pan.

“Tell me again?” I humored him.

“There’s been a huge increase in natural foods buying during the past three years. It’s poised to explode. I’m going to ride the wave. God, who would’ve thought all those years of reading food labels would pay off? Remember when I used to warn you about those disgusting neon pink cupcakes?”

“Hey,” I said. “They were good!”

Michael smacked me on the butt with a dish towel. “People don’t know what they’re putting into their bodies. But they’re going to start caring, and they’re going to get mad. I’ll keep my ingredients list fresh and simple and natural. The timing couldn’t be more perfect!”

I nodded, even though Michael would’ve kept talking without any encouragement, and he ladled warm marinara sauce on the noodles before setting our plates down on the wobbly table that barely afforded enough room for them.

“Maybe I should tweak my marketing plan once more,” he said, spinning around and heading for his laptop.

I looked down at our dinner, then looked over at Michael, whose fingers were already flying across the keyboard. Michael wasn’t eating? That, more than anything, drove home to me how serious he was about this project.

And two nights later, he was waiting when I came home from work.

“Ten
A.M.
next Friday!” he shouted, handing me an icy cold bottle of Bud Light.

“You got the meeting with the former buyer?” I asked, sinking into the futon—as much as I could sink, given how hard the mattress was—and sliding off my shoes.

“Nope,” he said, shaking his head as he sat down beside me and began rubbing my feet a little too vigorously. “The current buyer! I met the former buyer today, and she already set it up. She loves DrinkUp.
Loves
it! I found this guy who designs wine labels for a little winery in Maryland. They’re really classy, look”—he sprang up and grabbed a wine bottle and handed it to me—“and he’s going to do some mock-up labels for me. He already came up with one concept, but it isn’t quite right. I don’t care if he has to go through ten drafts. I can’t go in there looking second-rate. This is huge. I feel it, Julia. It’s finally happening!”

My heart skipped a beat, but not for the right reason. I thought about the costs Michael was incurring—already, before his brand-new company had even made a cent—but I forced myself to swallow my worry. This was Michael’s dream; I couldn’t tarnish it with my old fears.

I stood up and grabbed his hand.

“We’re going out,” I said, putting down my beer and pulling him toward the door. There wasn’t any question of where we’d go—the pizza place on the corner was all we could afford, since Michael got an employee discount—but still, we splurged on a bottle of Chianti and toasted our future and leaned close to one another over the red-checked tablecloth, our fingers twining together, talking until they brightened the lights and kicked us out.

“It’s going to happen,” Michael said, his blue eyes darkening with intensity. “I’ve got a good product, the market needs it, and with Raj’s contacts, I can make it work. The next thing to do is get investors—but if Whole Foods likes me, it’ll be a snap.”

“Definitely,” I agreed, squeezing his hand. I hate to admit it, but I still wasn’t convinced. Flavored water?
That
was Michael’s stroke of genius, the culmination of all he’d learned at one of the country’s top business schools? It seemed so … so simple.

Twelve

OUR WEDDING DAY WAS absolutely perfect.

By then I’d overseen enough receptions to know that it was the little moments people kept as cherished memories, not the splashy, oversize ones. One of the most elaborate weddings I planned was ruined when the groom got so drunk he spent half of the party throwing up in the bathroom while the bride sobbed and her father muttered curses (“I’m not quite sure what shots to get,” the photographer had whispered to me. “A little direction?”).

Michael and I didn’t have many friends to invite, and we both wanted to keep things simple.

“Should we ask your parents to come?” he wondered.

I tried to answer him, but started to cry instead. “I want them here,” I finally said. “But my dad … I mean, I know he’s sick. It’s like alcoholism. But I keep thinking about how he ruined my mom’s life. I mean, they’re still living with my uncle. She’s waitressing, for God’s sakes. My mom is pushing sixty and she’s on her feet all day serving hamburgers.”

“He stopped, though, right?”

“For now,” I said. My dad had quit gambling a half dozen times before—always with grand promises—but it never stuck.

“It’ll hurt them if I don’t invite them,” I said. “And how can I have a wedding without my parents there? I’d feel so strange walking down the aisle alone …”

“We could elope,” Michael said immediately. “It’ll just be you and me. That’s always been enough for us, hasn’t it?”

His arms closed around me. “We don’t need anyone else. Let’s do it soon. Right away. We just need to get our license, but it won’t take long. The waiting period’s only a few days.”

I rested my head against his shoulder. “Just you and me?”

“Next week,” he said. “I want to marry you before my Whole Foods meeting. Jules, this is the beginning of everything for us. My company, our new life together … let’s start it off right.”

I looked down at the simple engagement band Michael had given me a few months earlier, when he’d proposed, then I lifted up my face to his and smiled.

I wore a classic cream-colored sheath dress that was deeply discounted because of a torn hem I’d sewed up in under ten minutes, and carried a bouquet of wildflowers that Michael had picked for me. As we stood in front of a justice of the peace reciting our vows, Michael wiggled his eyebrows when I got to the “obey” part, almost making me laugh out loud. But as we were pronounced man and wife, he stared into my eyes for a long moment, and the look in his took my breath away.

He cooked me dinner that night, and we shared a bottle of champagne—the first we’d ever tasted. Afterward he reached for my hand and pulled me to my feet. He pressed a button on our battered old CD player, and we swayed together in our tiny apartment as Louis Armstrong sang “What a Wonderful World.”

“I’ll buy you a diamond soon,” Michael promised as we cuddled in bed. By then we’d both forgotten about the prenup we’d signed that morning. “A huge one. You won’t be allowed to walk down the street because the glare will blind innocent bystanders.”

“Why are bystanders always presumed to be innocent?” I asked.

“Good point,” he said. “I’m sure plenty of them are downright evil. They deserve to be blinded. I’m going to give you another five carats so we can take them all out.”

“But what about you?” I asked, tracing a lazy finger along his jawline, then down the slope of his shoulder. He was still so skinny, but I loved his body. “Are you going to buy yourself a Lamborghini?”

“Maybe a boat,” Michael mused.

“You’d have no idea what to do with a boat.” I laughed. “You’d crash it on the first day.”

“So the Lamborghini,” Michael decided. “Unless I buy a backup boat. You know, for when the first one is in the shop.”

“And you’ll need to add ’the Third’ to your name,” I pointed out. “It’s a requirement for stuffy rich guys.”

“Are stuffy rich guys allowed to ravish their wives twice in one night?” Michael asked, rolling from his back to his side to face me.

“It’s a requirement,” I whispered in his ear. “Read your stuffy rich guy manual.”

I wish I could’ve been there the day Michael circled the Whole Foods parking lot in our rusty station wagon and lugged his four thermoses of DrinkUp into the upscale grocery store. What did the beverages buyer think of Michael, dressed in his best black sweater and slacks, his hair carefully gelled for the first time in his life? Did he look into Michael’s eyes and see the intensity burning there, and know that if force of will could guarantee victory, Michael would be a runaway success?

The buyer drank the samples—“He was like a wine connoisseur, Julia, he sniffed first and everything”—and then, right there on the spot, offered Michael a deal: Whole Foods would test out two pallets, or ten thousand bottles, in a trial run for seventeen stores in the Mid-Atlantic area.

“My God! That fast?” I said. “When do they want them?”

“I asked them to give me two months,” Michael said, absently tugging his curls back into wild disarray. “Julia, here’s the thing. They’re not going to pay me for whatever they sell. They’re doing me a favor by testing them out. I have to absorb the cost; that’s traditionally the way these things work.”

I felt my pulse quicken. “So you’ll be taking on debt.”
More debt
, I thought, my mind flashing, almost like a reflex, to the copy of the prenup I’d tucked in a shoe box in our closet.

Michael didn’t seem to hear me. “I need investors, but Raj is going to help with that. He’s fronting me some money, too. There’s this other guy from my marketing class whose dad is really rich; his name is on a plaque above one of the classroom doors. I’m going to ask him to kick in five thousand. I think if he knows Raj is doing it, and I’ve got Whole Foods behind me … Now I need to rent a place to make the water; this kitchen is too small. I need a U-Haul to get the stuff up to Buffalo—I found a good bottler there …” And he was off, again, sprinting for his laptop, while I frowned and stared after him.

By the time Whole Foods let Michael set up a little tasting table in their store, everything had somehow come together. The customers never saw the mistakes and setbacks—the cases of bottles that were labeled upside down, the batches of DrinkUp that turned out too sour before Michael tweaked his recipes for mass production, and the endless hours he spent on the phone, cajoling investors who’d dropped out because the risk seemed too great, finding replacements, and begging his bottler to delay the bill in exchange for a percentage of the first two years’ profit. The only thing they noticed was a polite young man in a freshly printed DrinkUp apron, standing there and charming them into accepting a cup as they walked by.

“You look like a soccer star,” Michael called to a ten-year-old boy. “This stuff’ll give you energy you won’t believe when you’re on the field. Here, take a cup for your mom, too. It’s much better for him than Gatorade, and one bottle has a day’s worth of ten vitamins. Now, how about you, sir? Take a sip of my Not-Too-Sweet Lemonade and see if it doesn’t remind you of the lemonade stand you had when you were a kid. How’d I know you had one? Because you look like an entrepreneur.”

He never stopped talking, never grew tired, never wavered in his belief that his drinks were exactly what customers needed. And they began to believe it, too; I stood near the checkout aisle and saw the carts—not all of them, but some—had bottles of DrinkUp tucked in among the free-range chicken breasts and organic salad greens and pita chips. He’d picked the perfect store to launch his product, I realized, feeling my respect for Michael bump up another notch. I wandered over to where he held court like a carnival barker and snapped a photo as he held a little paper cup aloft. Later I framed it and put it on my desk in my office; it has always been my favorite picture of him.

The pallets sold out quickly—every last bottle—and Whole Foods followed up with an order for ten more. But this time, Michael got paid. And years later, he had the last laugh when Georgetown gave him an honorary degree.

I hate to admit that so many other people believed in Michael before I did. But when he and I got married, I was the richer one. I knew he was planning to hire salespeople to cold-call on grocery stores and gourmet markets. He was desperate to stay ahead of the pack. “When everyone sees me taking off, they’re going to jump all over this,” he often said, tightening his jaw in his best imitation of a threatening, 150-pound man.

All those salaries, all those flights around the country … I couldn’t help adding up the costs in my mind, but Michael never hesitated in taking on even more debt, or wooing more backers. His student loans were exorbitant, too.

But it wasn’t
my
debt, I reassured myself as my husband methodically built his company by selling bottle after bottle. I’d never be like my mother, wiping down tables at age sixty because I’d tied my fortunes to the wrong man. Michael’s company couldn’t hurt me.

Thirteen

ONE MORNING AFTER WE’D been married for a couple of years, I opened my eyes to find Michael leaning over me, waving a copy of
USA Today
inches away from my face.

“I’m asleep,” I groaned, batting away the paper. The previous night I’d held a beach-themed fiftieth birthday party for a woman who’d insisted on filling the dance floor with real sand. The cleanup had lasted longer than the actual party.

“Look,” he whispered.

I yawned and rubbed my eyes. “Oprah’s producing another movie?” I asked, scanning the headlines.

“The photo,” he said, his voice strangled.

I glanced at him, then sat up straighter. There it was: on the table next to Oprah Winfrey, within reach of her famous bejeweled hand, was the beverage she’d consumed during the interview. DrinkUp’s Berrywater.

“Michael!” I leapt out of bed, instantly awake, and flung my arms around his neck.

“Do you know what this means?” he shouted, grabbing me around the waist and hoisting me into the air and dancing me around our apartment. “I’ve gotten a hundred messages this morning from store owners and customers and suppliers wanting to know where to buy Oprah’s water. When the interviewer asked her about it, she said Madonna recommended she try it, and now she drinks it every day. She said it gives her energy. Every fucking
day
! I could’ve bought ten Super Bowl ads and it wouldn’t have done this for my company! Jules, this is it!”

“You did it!” I squealed.

Michael put me down, and I ran over to an open window, leaning out of it and screaming, “Oprah and Madonna love my husband’s water! They freaking
love
it!”

A sleepy-sounding voice shouted back: “Tell them to shut up!”

“We
did it,” Michael said, his voice awed and quiet now. We stood there, staring at each other and breathing hard, I in one of Michael’s old T-shirts and he in one of his even older T-shirts, feeling the molecules shift and rearrange all around us, and knowing nothing would be the same, ever again.

“Come here, you,” I said, my mouth curving into a smile. I wanted to feel his thin arms wrapped around me and hear the sound of his rapid heartbeat echoing in my ears. I wanted to kiss him forever, then take him out for pancakes and champagne. This was the moment we’d dreamed of, back when we’d saved our dollars in an old cigar box. No—we’d never dreamed this high. At least, I hadn’t.

Michael wagged his eyebrows. “Exactly what did you have in mind, Mrs. Dunhill? Are you thinking impure thoughts?”

“Come find out.” I grinned, but Michael’s cell rang again and he snatched it up.

“I saw it,” he said, his hand slipping away from my mine as he walked out of the room. “I’ll be there in ten minutes. Five. I need to capitalize on this, fast. Here’s what I’m thinking …”

“I’m sorry, Julie,” he whispered, ducking his head back through the doorway and covering the mouthpiece with one hand. “Tonight. We’ll celebrate tonight.”

But when I fell asleep that night, naked and cold, the space in bed beside me was empty. By the time I woke up, Michael was already gone, leaving nothing but the faint imprint of his head on a pillow to prove he’d been there at all.