like stubborn colds, when she was grading history tests or peeling more carrots that wouldn’t get eaten. A girl named Jo once had a life / But that’s gone now; she’s only wife.
It might have been easier to endure if Bethie’s success hadn’t been so spectacular. In a few years’ time, her sister had gone from making jam in the kitchen of Blue Hill Farm and selling it at farmers’ markets to selling it at a little shop to supplying what seemed like half of the restaurants and hotels in the South. Jo wondered about the toll that might exact on her sister’s marriage, but Harold seemed perfectly fine with things. It probably helped that he, too, had started his own business, a security consulting firm. At first, he ran it as a part-time venture, in addition to his work at the bank, but eventually he had more business than he could handle, and he left his job to run the firm, which now employed almost a hundred men and women, many of them veterans.
Bethie and Harold glowed, with success and contentedness, and with, Jo thought, a little meanly, the kind of well-rested good looks you could have only when you were childless. She’d asked her sister about it once, and Bethie had given a firm headshake, hinting that there was some kind of war-related health issue, some reason that they’d chosen not to have children. Jo hadn’t pushed for details. Nor had she told Dave, who probably would have started making mean jokes about precisely what had been shot off Harold in the war. Dave himself had been a full-time student during the draft. Jo suspected that he’d taken a leisurely path to his bachelor’s degree in order to stretch out his student deferment. He hadn’t done anything close to illegal. Still, Jo was aware that this was one more arena in which her sister had bested her. Bethie’s husband was not only successful, and a good provider, he had served his country, had been wounded in combat. As for her husband, he’d once been briefly hospitalized after breaking three bones in his foot when a ten-pound weight had fallen from a shelf.
Jo sighed. Her sister looked at her with a quizzical expression. Bethie had changed her hair again. The Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction perm was gone, replaced by a long, layered Diane Keaton in Baby Boom bob. Maybe they were just busy, Jo thought. She knew the story of Blue Hill Farm by heart, the myth that her sister had burnished in all of those newspaper profiles, how she and her partners had gone from making jam in small batches in the Blue Hill Farm kitchen to selling it at farmers’ markets, and how one restaurant owner had asked them to make jam for his customers, then two restaurants, then three, then hotels. By 1981, Blue Hill Farm had a dozen wholesale customers, and they’d shifted their base of operations to a commercial kitchen in Loring Heights. The next year, they’d won an award for outstanding product line in the nation at the Specialty Food Show in New York City, and sent out their first catalog. Jo had paged through the glossy photographs and ecstatic descriptions and wondered if Bethie had missed her, and who she’d found to write about the various jams and dressings. The orders Bethie had written had surpassed every expectation, and two chain grocery stores had started to carry their wares. Bethie and her partners had hired a CFO, a bright young woman with a Wharton degree, and broken ground on construction of a building that would house a much bigger commercial kitchen, in addition to a shop, a restaurant, and a cooking school. On that afternoon, in 1987, Blue Hill Farm was producing around forty thousand jars of preserves daily, in addition to the new product lines rolled out twice a year. The farm itself no longer existed as a commune and had been completely remodeled, the peeling paint scraped off, the floorboards patched, the windows replaced, and a few new bathrooms added, along with modern plumbing. It was a shop/inn/tourist destination, and Bethie was the Blue Hill Farm co-CEO. She looked the part, too, with her hair cut and styled and highlighted, her peasant blouses and bell-bottoms swapped for shoulder pads and sharp Jil Sanders suits. Jo knew that Bethie still fretted about her weight, with her anxiety usually cresting right around the times she knew she’d be seeing her mother,