Whose Company Is This?

Chapter One: The Elk Jerky Man's Neighbor

The farmers market behind the old tobacco warehouse in Richmond ran from eight to one on Saturdays, and Camille Baptiste was always gone by ten fifteen, because by ten fifteen there was nothing left to sell and no reason to stand in a parking lot.

She had a folding table she'd bought at a church rummage sale, a tablecloth in a shade of green she described as "hospital," and forty jars of pikliz. Cabbage, carrot, shallot, Scotch bonnet, lime, vinegar. Her grandmother's recipe, which was really her grandmother's neighbor's recipe, which was really the recipe of an island Camille had visited twice, once as a baby and once at nineteen for a funeral where she had eaten so well she'd cried in an airport.

On her left, every week, was Gary Poteat, who sold elk jerky and had opinions about the Federal Reserve. On her right was a woman named Bitsy Vandergriff who sold what her sign called EMOTIONAL SUPPORT POTTERY, which was regular pottery with a card attached explaining what each bowl was going through.

"Morning, Camille," Gary said, arranging jerky into a pyramid. "You know they're printing money."

"Somebody should," Camille said.

Camille was twenty-seven. Four years earlier she had been a line cook at a restaurant called Fig & Anvil, which closed on a Tuesday with no warning and owed her two paychecks, an amount she had calculated so many times it had become a kind of prayer: one thousand, four hundred and eighty dollars. The chef had moved to Asheville and started a newsletter about intentional living.

Since then she had catered weddings, worked eleven months at a sandwich counter where the owner made everyone say "Have a crusty day," and accumulated $11,400 on a single credit card. She thought of the card as a roommate. She had named it Barry. Barry was quiet, Barry never did dishes, and Barry took a hundred and eighty dollars a month and gave nothing back.

The pikliz had started as a thing she made for herself because it was cheap and because it tasted like her grandmother's kitchen in Flatbush before her grandmother moved to Miami and started sending photos of her own ankles. Then it was a thing she made for friends. Then a girl at a party asked to buy a jar and handed her fifteen dollars, and Camille went home and stared at the fifteen dollars like it had spoken to her.

Now she made ninety jars a week in a shared commercial kitchen she rented in four-hour blocks at twenty-two dollars an hour, and she sold forty of them on Saturdays at twelve dollars each, and she sold the rest through a group text and a woman named Denise who ran a nail salon on Hull Street and moved shocking volume. Camille had never once, in two years, sat down and worked out what she was making per hour. She knew, in the way you know there is a noise in your car, that the answer would ruin something.

At 9:20 that Saturday in late March, a woman stopped at the table and did not pick up a jar.

This was the first strange thing. Everybody picked up a jar. The jar was the whole event. Instead the woman stood back about four feet and looked at the table the way people look at a painting they have decided in advance to like.

She was somewhere near forty, tall, in a linen jumpsuit the color of oatmeal, with sandals that had clearly cost more than Camille's rent contribution. Her hair was pulled back so tightly it seemed to be doing structural work. She had a jaw like an advertisement for water.

"Is this yours?" the woman said.

"It's for sale, if that's what you mean."

"That isn't what I mean." The woman finally stepped forward. "May I?"

Camille handed her a toothpick and the sample jar. The woman took a small amount of cabbage, examined it, and put it in her mouth.

What happened next lasted about nine seconds and Camille would think about it for the next year and a half.

The woman's eyes closed. Her hand came up and hovered near her collarbone. She made a noise — a low, wounded, honestly quite loud noise, somewhere between a hum and a groan, the noise a person makes when a chiropractor finds it. Bitsy Vandergriff looked over. Gary Poteat stopped stacking jerky.

And then the woman started to cry.

Not politely. Real tears, two of them, tracking down toward her jaw and hanging there.

"Ma'am," said Camille. "It's spicy, but it's not — I have napkins."

"It's not the heat." The woman took a shaking breath. "Do you know what I do?"

"No."

"I taste things professionally. I taste forty, fifty products a week. Fermented, cultured, sprouted, activated. Everything is either a lie or a lab." She pressed her fingertips under her eyes with real technique. "This is the most honest thing I have eaten in a decade."

"Okay," said Camille.

"I'm serious."

"I believe you. You're crying at a folding table."

The woman laughed, which made a bubble, which she dealt with in a way that made Camille like her. "I'm Skye Ridgeway. I own Wildfire Provisions."

Camille knew Wildfire Provisions the way you know a brand you can't afford: a squat sixteen-dollar jar of sauerkraut called Second Brain, sold at the co-op where Camille only bought bulk rice. There was also a tonic. The tonic was called Ancestral Fizz and Camille had once read the label out loud to Trina in a voice that made Trina spit water.

"I know Wildfire," Camille said, carefully.

"Then you know we're small and we're real and we're about to not be small." Skye reached across the table and took both of Camille's hands, which nobody had done to Camille since a physical. "Who taught you?"

"My grandmother. Sort of. Her neighbor taught her, and she taught me."

"Her neighbor," said Skye, in a whisper, like Camille had said something enormous.

Skye bought all forty jars.

She did it without hesitating, tapping a black card against Camille's phone reader while Gary Poteat watched with open envy, and then she stood there while Camille packed the jars into two boxes, and she said the thing that changed everything.

"Come work for me."

"Doing what?"

"That's the beautiful part." Skye tilted her head. "I don't have a box for you. I refuse to put you in a box. Head of Flavor Story."

Camille stared at her. "That's not a job."

"Nothing is a job. Jobs are a container we agreed on." Skye picked up a box, effortlessly, like a woman who did an activity. "Here's what's real: nineteen dollars an hour to start, which is not what you're worth, I know that, I'm saying it out loud so we both hear me say it. Plus equity, once we clean up the cap table. Which is happening. That's a whole conversation. But it's happening."

Camille's brain, trained by four years of restaurant math, seized instantly on the number. Nineteen dollars an hour was, at forty hours, thirty-nine thousand five hundred dollars a year. Camille had never made thirty-nine thousand dollars a year in her life. Camille had made twenty-six thousand dollars last year and had eaten cereal for dinner enough times that she had begun describing it to people as a lifestyle choice. She had a whole bit about it. The bit killed at parties and made her feel sick afterward.

"Equity," Camille said.

"Equity," Skye agreed, with tremendous warmth. "I don't do this. I want you to know I don't do this. I have never offered anyone a job at a farmers market."

They walked to the parking lot together. Skye's van was cream-colored and clean in a way that suggested a service. She loaded the jars, then turned around and looked at Camille with an expression of complete, undefended sincerity.

"I think you have something that can't be manufactured," she said. "And I think you've been standing next to a man selling elk."

"He's fine," Camille said. "He's got theories."

"You know what I mean."

And the awful thing, the thing Camille would have to admit to a room full of strangers eighteen months later, was that she did know what she meant. She had been standing next to a man selling elk. She had been standing there in the cold with a hospital-green tablecloth and a roommate named Barry and a recipe from a woman in Brooklyn who had died in 1998, and someone had finally, finally looked at all of it and said: this is worth more than this.

"Okay," Camille said, in the parking lot, before she had asked a single question about health insurance. "Yes."

Skye Ridgeway hugged her. Over Skye's shoulder Camille could see Bitsy Vandergriff holding up a bowl to a customer and explaining, with great feeling, what the bowl had been through.