Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [22]
Arlo was six foot four and lanky. He was sensitive and mellow and kind, and when he laughed, the sound could shake furniture. People always fell in love with him. Well, people other than her family, but that was no surprise. Kathleen thought (she hoped) that Maggie genuinely liked him, and her sister, Clare, too. The opinions held by the rest of the Kellehers were irrelevant.
When people asked her what she did, Kathleen told them she and Arlo were in the vermiculture composting business and hoped they would not ask her to elaborate. In layman’s terms, they sold live worms and a spray fertilizer known in the trade as worm poop tea to small and medium-size nurseries all over California. They always had worms at each stage of the process: worms being born, worms just taking their first infinitesimal bites of banana peel, and worms that had finished composting, leaving them with a magnificent pile of fertilizer to sift through. Their three million worms made three thousand pounds of castings each month.
They had bought the farm ten years earlier, site unseen, six months after they met. The house sat on five acres in Glen Ellen, a tiny farming town outside of Sonoma. They sold both their homes in Massachusetts to buy it, and with the addition of the money Kathleen had inherited after her father died, they could almost afford the place. Almost. Maggie had been alarmed when Kathleen first told her about the idea all those years ago, but after considering several hours of conversation and a thick folder’s worth of research, even Kathleen’s worrywart daughter had agreed that Arlo’s plan had potential. He needed only the financing to get it off the ground, and someone to believe in him.
This year, the company was thriving. Arlo’s special orchid tea had been written up in a national magazine about organic living and orders were through the roof. Best of all, they had been profiled in the Los Angeles Times and the Sonoma Index-Tribune that spring, leading to an account with a chain of gardening stores that had operations in three states.
Kathleen had surprised them both with her business savvy. It was her outreach that had earned them all the press. It had been her idea to work with local schools to get the steady supply of garbage necessary to run their company. She was even able to channel the pushy, Alice-like parts of herself into getting nurseries to take more product than they might have, or securing Arlo a better deal on bottling fees.
Her mother and her brother, Pat, made it clear that they still thought the whole endeavor was goofy and extravagant, never mind that Kathleen had turned a profit of more than two hundred thousand last year. She understood how they might have thought the idea was suspect in the beginning, but she wished that just once they could give her credit for her success.
She’d show them this coming year, anyway.
In the early winter, she was taking their business to the next level. The tenth anniversary of the farm was in November, and she planned to present Arlo with a surprise: a worm gin, which would potentially triple their monthly output. The gin cost twenty thousand—most small farms like theirs couldn’t afford that. But she had carefully saved two hundred dollars every month since they had arrived here, no matter what.
She knew Arlo would be overjoyed, and when she pictured his reaction, she felt elated. Kathleen imagined car commercials from the eighties—a man gives his wife a Lincoln wrapped up in a big red ribbon for Christmas. Perhaps she’d be the first person to ever tie an oversize bow around a machine designed to mass-produce poop.
She stood in the middle of the kitchen for a moment, and then called the office in town where the orders were processed to make sure that a bunch of invoices had been sent out on Friday. She spoke to Jerry, their faithful assistant,