Better Food for a Better World. Erin McGraw

      BETTER FOOD FOR A BETTER WORLD

      Copyright © 2013 Erin McGraw. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Slant

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      isbn 13: 978-1-62032-668-8

      eisbn 13: 978-1-62189-534-3

      Cataloging-in-Publication data:

      McGraw, Erin (1957– )

      Better food for a better world : a novel / Erin McGraw.

      x + 232 p. ; 23 cm.

      isbn 13: 978-1-62032-668-8

      1. Restaurants — California — Fiction. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology) — Fiction. I. Title.

      ps3563.c3674 b4 2013

      Manufactured in the USA.

      To Andrew

      Acknowledgements

      Special thanks are due to Phil Stephens and Sheila McKenna, for teaching me about music and performance, and to Leslie Cooksy, for teaching me about agriculture.

      Heartfelt thanks also to Greg Wolfe, who forgives me over and over and who has the energy of five normal people. To Julie Mullins, my great gratitude for her sharp eye and exquisite taste.

      First and last thanks always to Andrew. Always.

      Marriages to marriages

      are joined, husband and wife

      are plighted to all

      husbands and wives,

      any life has all lives

      for its delight.

      —wendell berry

      One

      Vivy

      What was the saddest thing in the world? Listening to Hank Shank—“Take it to the bank”—play “We Shall Overcome” on the banjo. Standing at the back of the superheated room, Vivy Jilet studied a wrinkle on the banjo’s grubby face and wondered whether Hank had made the instrument himself. Its stumpy neck looked like a finger cut off at the joint, and the string ends bristled up aggressively from the tuning pegs.

      “We are not afrai-ai-aid,” Hank Shank quavered, plunking dull, bottom-heavy notes that had only a nodding acquaintance with the ones coming out of his mouth. To listen was painful, and Vivy guessed there was plenty more to come. Hank Shank was singing verses she had never heard, and wore the folk singer’s dolefully sincere expression, the one that promised listeners they would be spared none of the travails of the people.

      She resettled herself, leaning back against the hot wall. The situation would not improve when he stopped singing. Since taking the stage half an hour ago, Hank Shank had filled the spaces between songs with stern lectures about the evils of consumerism, urging members of the dwindling audience not to let themselves be co-opted. “To resist society’s consumerist pressure is a revolutionary action,” he said.

      Suppressing a yawn, Vivy wondered whether Hank Shank had updated his rhetoric since 1968. Then she wondered whether he realized he was on a stage in an ice cream store, and that his act was being punctuated, not by cries of “Stick it to the man!” but by the chirping of a cash register.

      If the cash register had been chirping more often, Vivy wouldn’t have cared about Hank. He was performing here at Natural High Ice Cream—Better Food for a Better World, the sign promised—because Nancy Califfe, one of the store’s six owners, had decided it needed a gala to celebrate its third birthday. “Something special,” she had said, “to draw people in. I know the perfect person.”

      Vivy should have known right then. If Nancy could be counted on for anything, it was her flawless reliability when it came to issues of marketing: always, always wrong. Vivy and the other partners spent most of their time blocking Nancy’s tone-deaf ideas—the raffle whose first prize was twenty-five cubic feet of mulch, the community pitch-in day to help the partners clean out the storeroom.

      “What are you going to give people for helping us?” Vivy had asked.

      “What do you mean, ‘give people’?” Nancy said.

      The store had begun as a lighthearted kind of business, three couples pooling their money and time to run an ice cream shop. The good-natured enterprise let them pretend they were back in college—they came to work wearing cutoffs and T-shirts, and they laughed their way through planning meetings, where they came up with ice cream names like Shade Grown Coffee Crunch and Che Guevara Guava. When Nancy said the store needed a new slogan, Vivy and Sam, Vivy’s husband, proposed “Natural High Ice Cream: Street Legal.” Nancy actually let that one through, a rare bit of flexibility on her part, now that Vivy looked back.

      Nancy had always had a bit of sand to her; store ownership had hardened it to cement. But all of them, Vivy supposed, were becoming more themselves: Nancy’s husband Paul was perpetually angry, David and Cecilia Moore were earnest, and Sam was lazily goofy, drawing cartoons of Nancy with flames coming out of her mouth as she proposed another awful idea at the weekly meetings she insisted on. She drew precise financial