28
“NOW, NATTIE,” my mother was saying, “I know you have so much on your plate right now, with the farm and the little ones, so please tell me if this is too much to ask—but Abigail was saying she’d love to come visit with the kids for the weekend, and I thought, what a lovely idea!”
“Oh,” I said. “What a surprise.”
I was holding my two-month-old son in my arms. Samuel. I’d been breastfeeding in the darkness in a barely furnished room when my mother called. It was technically Clementine’s room. It was her mattress in the corner of the room, her books arranged in a neat little pile on the opposite wall. We kept forgetting to order the rest of the furniture. The princess bed frame, the matching pink bookshelf. They were floating in my laptop, waiting patiently in an online shopping cart. I just kept forgetting to purchase them.
It was June. Our second summer on the farm. On the other side of this great nation, Reena was living in New York City as a recent graduate. I knew this because I checked on her Instagram account daily. I saw every highly unattractive selfie she shared of herself, raccoon-eyed on the subway at three in the morning, surrounded by young men and women who always looked like they were mid-conversation and trying to ignore her. I knew she hadn’t gotten a gig at McKinsey when she announced that she was working at some no-name mid-tier consulting firm that would require her to travel every other
weekend. She was flailing, obviously—and I, on the other hand, was thriving.
I just needed to remember to order that furniture.
“So what do you think?” my mother said. “Should we come this weekend? Now’s a good time for Abigail to travel.” Only my mother would describe an hour’s drive as traveling. Abigail was five months pregnant with her fifth child. She’d lapped me several times over with her children. I hated her for it.
“What do I think,” I echoed softly. What did I think? Samuel snuffled in my arms, smacking his lips loudly. I stared at his little face in the darkness, smushed up against my breast. He was a sweet little boy, with none of the sharp edges of his older sister. I loved him effortlessly and distantly. When I held him, it felt like I was waving at a relative from very far away. Hello, there! Or maybe: Goodbye!
I’d opted for the anesthetic this time. I’d been miles away from this child even as he was making his slow exit out of my body.
Here is what I thought first: If they come for the weekend, they will see the vegetables and the half-tilled fields and the workers, clutching their ribs and laughing breathlessly at Caleb’s mangled attempts at Spanish.
Here is what I thought next: If they come for the weekend, Mother can hold the baby.
I let out a long breath. I kept forgetting to breathe these days. I was so tired. My son was so beautiful. I was so happy. Really, I was. Happy.
—
Two days later, my family and I stood in the driveway as Abigail’s junkyard minivan rolled up the hill. Little Samuel was in my arms in a brand-new blue gingham shirt. Clementine was standing stiffly at my feet, wearing a too- small dress in the same fabric as the baby. I’d gotten the outfits from a local
children’s store in town months ago, certain that I could beat the pace of her growth spurt. Caleb was standing next to me, wearing a wide-brimmed hat.
“Well, aren’t you the perfect ranch family,” my sister said when she got out of the car.
Her children poured out of the van like termites. Brady, Brandon, Benjamin, Becky, each of them about fifteen months apart. The children went careening toward the fields, screaming about a game of tag. Clementine hesitated, then dropped my hand and began to walk slowly after them.
My mother got out of the passenger seat. “Goodness,” she said, “would you look at those mountains.”
“Welcome, y’all!” Caleb brayed out suddenly.
All of us looked at him. He looked back at us with an expression of terrified confusion, like he’d just woken up and found himself here, mid- conversation. I sighed. It had been a mistake to tell my husband to pretend.
He’d internalized it incorrectly and now managed the feat only in fitful spurts, which obviously defeated the whole purpose of performance.
I threw a holly, jolly smile onto my face. “Caleb’s becoming a regular cowboy these days!”
“How marvelous,” my mother said quickly, and rushed to hug my husband before he could humiliate himself further.
While Caleb talked my mother’s ear off about his wide-brimmed hat (Lord, give me strength), Abigail sidled up to me. “He’s beautiful,” she said softly, looking at Samuel. She touched his bald head with an index finger, and he let out a little squeak in reply.
I nodded at her kids, who were now teaching Clementine how to play tag.
“The children seem well.”
“Oh, they’re the best. I don’t know what I would do without them.
They’re like my little angels.” I watched her as she watched her children.
She’d aged. We hadn’t seen each other almost at all when I was living with Caleb’s parents. When I moved back to Idaho, I had noticed something different about her, something strange in her gaze, but I hadn’t taken a moment to really consider it until now. I’d seen my sister in all manner of moods, happy and sad and tired and overwhelmed, but this, what I was seeing on her face now, was something else entirely. Something altogether new.
Then she looked at me, and her expression shifted. “And how have you been?” she asked. “Better?”
“Oh, yes. I’m perfect.” Then I called to my mother, “Would you like to hold the baby?”
—
While Abigail’s kids chased each other through the rooms, I gave my mother and sister a tour of the house, pointing out everything that was going to get replaced in the renovation: the light fixtures, the granite countertops, the marble-tiled bathroom floors. We’d been meeting with architects, I told them.
Only a week ago, we’d found the one we wanted to work with. (Do you still want indoor toilets, ma’am, or would you prefer an outhouse?) “We’re just waiting for him to fit us into our schedule,” I said, “and then all this is going to go bye-bye.”
“But it’s all brand-new,” my mother said. Samuel was fast asleep in her arms.
“It’s just not our taste,” I said. “I mean, really.” I gestured to the living room. “I mean, it looks like a Pottery Barn outlet got sick and threw up in here.”
My sister stared at a nearby wall sconce, as if trying to understand what a light fixture could’ve done to warrant such violent execution. “Well, don’t
throw out all these perfectly good appliances. At least donate them.” Abigail paused delicately. “I could probably take some stuff. If it would help you, I mean.”
It was obvious Christian-speak for I’d like your leftovers, please. I played along, feigning interest at the idea of donation. “It would be so helpful if you did that for us.”
Still, my mother looked fretful. “Do you really want to get rid of all these perfectly good appliances? It’ll cost you a fortune to replace!”
I gave her an apologetic wince. “Money is not a concern.”
—
Except it was. Oh, it was! A little secret I told no one, that I barely acknowledged even in the quiet of my own thoughts: the money was nearly gone. We hadn’t pulled the trigger on the renovation because I wasn’t yet clear on how we would be able to afford it. We were just about to hit the three-year anniversary of the farm. We’d eradicated the black mold and restored the structural integrity of the barn and bought brand-new top-of-the- line tractors, we had tilled fields and daily workers and a cow and some chickens, we paid the financial equivalent of the GDP of a small nation in taxes each year, and also, we had yet to turn a profit as small as a penny. Just a few days earlier, Caleb had joked happily that our zucchini and egg earnings from the most recent farmers market pop-up had almost covered a full tank of gas for the truck. To which I replied in happy-wife-singsong, “You can’t put a price on learning!”
What I wanted to say: Want to blow through five million dollars so quickly it makes your head spin? Buy a fucking farm.
—
After the house tour, I took my sister and my mother out to the fields. We stood at the top of the hill and watched my husband, several hundred feet away, chasing the kids in a turbocharged game of tag while our latest batch of men from Home Depot worked the fields, two of them driving tractors that dragged great silver rakes across the dirt, three of them walking around and pulling big rocks out of the soil.
My mother stared out at the scene with a look of abject dismay, her poker face momentarily abandoned. “What are you growing?”
“Beets, I think,” I said. “And asparagus? I can’t remember. Something to complement the zucchinis. This is Caleb’s world. I try to keep out of it and let him run the show.”
“Ah!” My mother laughed feebly, ever a good sport. “Divide and conquer. Always a good approach.”
“I don’t remember you ever wanting to live on a farm,” Abigail said. She waved at a horsefly.
“It was my idea, actually, to move here,” I said. “I was the one who brought it up to Caleb on our first date, the idea of living on a farm.”
“Did you.”
“I did.”
“Why? You hate animals. And dirt.”
I looked at Abigail. There it was again: that strange expression on her face.
“Well,” my mother said smoothly, before I could reply. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a prettier farm in my life.”
“Pretty as a picture,” Abigail said. Then, blasphemy: she pulled a pack of cigarettes from her bag. My mother and I both gasped.
“Abigail!” I said.
“Abigail,” my mother echoed fiercely. “The children.”
“The children, the children!” Abigail said in soprano imitation, a cigarette now held delicately between her teeth. She rolled her eyes and said through a gritted jaw, “They’re specks in the distance, Mother.” She was rattling around in her bag for a lighter now, oblivious to or uninterested in our gaping expressions. “God,” she muttered as she held the flame to her lips. She took a deep drag, exhaled with evident relief, then said again, “God, let someone care about me as much as they care about the children.” She stepped back, waved her cigarette in a big circle, highlighting the scene before us: the fields, the workers, the children, my husband. “You’re right, though, Mother: it is pretty.” She cocked her head, narrowed her eyes pensively, took another drag. Glanced back at me. “But do you ever get sick of the smell, Nattie? Do you ever get tired of breathing in so much shit?”
I stared at her in shock. “What is wrong with you today?”
“Abigail,” my mother said, “why don’t you go back to the house and take a nap?”
Abigail didn’t respond, just took another long drag, frowning at something in the distance. Smoke billowed around her words. “I’m not tired.”
“Well,” I snapped, “you look exhausted to me.”
She turned sharply to me. “You know what? I am tired. Mother, can you corral the children to nap when you come back inside?” Before my mother could stutter out a response, she dropped the cigarette and pressed a cowboy boot heel into the grass, then turned and walked quickly back to the house.
As soon as she was out of earshot, I hissed to my mother, “What in the Lord’s name has gotten into her?”
My mother gave me a skittish look. “Let’s just be charitable, shall we?
The poor thing has had a hard time at home recently. She hasn’t been sleeping well. She isn’t herself!”
I rolled my eyes, then dropped to a crouch and rooted around in the high
grass for Abigail’s cigarette butt.
—
That night we took the kids to a rodeo an hour away, farther into the mountains. It was a cool night, the kind of evening that felt like a postcard vision of the Wild West, all the reds and whites and blues dipped in shades of diesel-grade Americana: cerulean sky, fire-truck clay dirt, divinely bright rodeo lights. The ice cream truck sold popsicles colored like flags. The rodeo clowns wore tasseled vests made of blue-and-white star fabric. We sat in the stands and watched teenage boys face down bulls the size of Abigail’s minivan, their expressions streaked with morbid determination. When they ran and dipped and jabbed, they bared their teeth like little animals, their metal braces catching the stadium lights. Teenage girls sauntered through the bleachers in leggings, holding out Tupperware containers for donations to the troops overseas. Caleb bounced baby Samuel on his lap, pointing at the bull riders, whispering to our drooling, incoherent son, “Someday that’ll be you, pal.” My sister kept glancing around at the men in the crowd, her gaze lingering on the bald spots, the muddy boots, the quiet belches, until finally she realized I was watching her and turned to face pointedly forward.
The crowd roared in unison at the first sight of blood. Caleb bought all the children fried dough. My mother cried at the beginning when a six-year- old sang the national anthem. Clementine cried at the end when she saw what happened to the bulls.
We got dinner on the way home at a famous country-fried steak house on the side of the highway. The waitress handed out plates loaded with sickly- sweet dinner rolls and steak gone spongy with gravy. Abigail pushed butter- soaked veggies around on her plate, completely impervious to my glare.
Across the table, Caleb was talking my mother’s ear off about the forums.
No, not one chat room, he explained patiently, but multiple: he used his fingers to tick them off as he went. He had his farming buddies, his homeschooling buddies, his intellectual buddies, and so forth. The manosphere, he called it, a phrase he’d mentioned in my presence before, which always sounded to me like an amusement park for grown men.
Welcome to Manosphere: Where the Men Go!
“Man-o-sphere,” my mother repeated, in the same way Doug had done months earlier, when he and Amelia had visited. Like they were both learning to speak Italian. Amelia hadn’t said anything at all; they were only stopping by for the night on their way to drop her off at a rehab clinic in Wyoming, and she had accordingly spent the whole dinner looking mournfully at her glass of Sauvignon Blanc, like she was spending a last evening with a lover before the war was on.
“Manosphere,” Doug had said a second time, frowning slightly at the thought. Then he tapped Caleb’s phone and said, “Show me.”
My mother, on the other hand, merely sat back in her chair in contemplation.
—
When we got home, Caleb told us to relax in the living room. “You ladies spend time together,” Caleb said, taking the baby from my arms. “I’ll give
the kids a bath.”
I frowned. “All of them? At once?”
It seemed a bit unnatural—Abigail’s oldest, Brady, was now seven, and seemed to play a bit rough—but Caleb waved my concern away and began corralling them down the hall.
“Not the baby, though!” I called after him. “Don’t put the baby in the bath!”
“Duh,” he called back.
Meanwhile, Abigail was already pulling a bottle of urine-yellow Chardonnay out of her bag. “What about a glass of wine? Mama? Natalie?”
“But you’re pregnant,” I said.
“A thimble won’t hurt me,” she said, then filled a goblet-size glass to the brim.
I didn’t say anything, just exchanged a glance with my mother while Abigail handed us our glasses and guided us over to the couch. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen my mother have a glass of wine on an evening that had not been sanctioned as celebratory by the church. Now she took one without comment.
“So,” Abigail said finally, once we were seated. “There’s something I want to tell you all.”
I sat down on the couch expectantly. The way my sister was sitting, with her hand resting on her pregnant stomach, I couldn’t help but think: She looks so old. Only two years older than me, not yet thirty, but she could’ve been forty-five. Her forehead held three deep etchings that gave her a look of constant, parenthetical despair, and too many of her body parts had begun to swing at the smallest movement. Her arms, her breasts, her jowls. Not fat— not yet at least—but deflated. That’s what children and poverty do: suck the
collagen right out of you.
“I’m leaving Bryce,” Abigail said.
My mother sat back and clapped her hand to her chest as if she’d been shot. I, on the other hand, let out a little laugh, because I honestly thought my sister was making a bad joke to lighten the mood from such a tense day.
When her severe expression didn’t break, though, I said, “You can’t be serious.”
“Lord,” my mother moaned. “Lord, help me.”
“I called a divorce lawyer,” Abigail said. “I signed a retainer.”
I shook my head. “But how can you afford a lawyer?”
Abigail frowned. “That’s your first question?”
“You and Bryce have no money. How can you afford to divorce him?”
“I took out a loan, if you really want to know.”
“But how did you qualify for a loan?”
“I tell you I’m getting a divorce, and all you care about is the money?
How about ‘I’m so sorry to hear this, Abigail’? How about ‘Why are you getting divorced, Abigail’?”
I rolled my eyes. “I know why you’re getting divorced.”
“Why you might get divorced,” my mother interjected. “I mean, really, I think we need to pause for a moment and consider the implications of—”
“And why am I getting divorced, Natalie? If you know so much?”
“Because your husband is mean and dumb and drinks too much. He probably calls you names in front of the children. He probably hits you sometimes.” I paused, waiting for Abigail to confirm or deny this hypothesis, but she remained silent, her expression so still, so fathomless in its depth, that it looked like a great body of water at night. And so I went on, ignoring the terrifying stillness of my sister’s face, ignoring, too, the horrified expression on my mother’s. Lord, save us all. “He’s lazy, too. He’s never done anything with that shop. The man is and has always been a loser, but now it’s becoming harder for you to bear, and so now you, my poor sister, have somehow gotten it into your head that you will be better off without him, and I’m sorry, Abigail, but you will not.”
My mother’s hand was still pressed against her heart, like she was trying to stanch an arterial bleed. “The children,” she kept saying. “The children.
The children.” Less a phrase than a pulse.
“The children will be fine,” Abigail said angrily. “And I will be—”
“You will be a single mother of five living on food stamps,” I snapped.
“That is what you will be. You don’t even have a job history, Abigail. My God. You’d be lucky if they hired you to bag groceries with the teenagers in town.”
Abigail was crying now. My mother was too. It was just possible to hear the faint whistling of my husband down the hall while he shampooed five sets of heads. My fury circled back around, and it felt, suddenly, like I was eating myself alive. “Have you thought about where you’ll live? You can move in with Mother for a while, but not forever. And then what? You’ve never lived on your own before, Abigail. Do you know what it takes to apply for an apartment? Do you even know what a credit score is?”
“Stop it,” Abigail whispered. “Please, Natalie, stop it.”
I couldn’t have stopped if I wanted to, and I didn’t want to. I was angrier than I’d ever been in my life. I felt sick with it. “Do you honestly think the rules don’t apply to you? That you can just waltz away from all your responsibilities, completely unscathed?”
“Of course I don’t, that’s not what I’m saying, that’s not what I—”
“Do you think Bryce won’t file for custody? Of course he will. He’ll be remarried within the year, and then he and his new bride will fight for the children just to spite you. He’ll say you’re a cruel mother, a drunk, and the judge will agree with him, and before long you’ll be seeing your children every other Saturday. They won’t even know you.”
“What do I do?” Abigail said suddenly. “Oh my God, what do I do?”
She looked at my mother and me with such a blankly panicked expression that she seemed inhuman to me, like some animal that had wandered onto a highway. Stop it, I nearly hissed, stop looking like that, so pathetic, but I was officially out of breath. My mother scooched over to Abigail on the couch.
“There, there. Oh, Abigail, honey, just take a deep breath—”
I breathed in sharply, and for a moment I was back in that hospital room, gasping in panic at my own irretrievable mistake. My heart constricted painfully and I stood up. “I’m going to check on the children.”
As I walked down the hallway, a memory surfaced: a stapled set of papers, handed to me a few days before my wedding.
“I can’t do it, Mama,” Abigail sobbed behind me. “I can’t do this for another forty years.”
It’s a basic prenuptial agreement, Doug had said. You’re welcome to look it over with your lawyer.
“Of course you can do it, sweetie,” my mother said. “Of course you can.”
As if I’d ever spoken to a lawyer in my life.
“How? How can I keep going like this?”
Just sign here, here, and here. That’s it, and then you’re finished.
“You keep going because you have to.”
And then the same paperwork, the same conversation, two years later: a basic financial agreement.
“The children will be done with their bath soon. They can’t see their mother in such a state, now, can they?”
Caleb’s name, and Caleb’s name alone, will be on the deed for the ranch.
A twinkle in Doug’s eye as he explained this small asterisk to our original
gentleman’s agreement.
“I think I’m going to be sick—”
Of course, I had said calmly. I was going to suggest the same thing myself. Though my hand shook uncontrollably when I signed my name on the
final paper.
“There, there, darling. There, there.”
I reached the bathroom door, opened and shut it quickly behind me.
Abigail’s children were screeching and laughing, splashing each other in the
tub, while Clementine sat naked next to Caleb on the side of the tub, watching her cousins with a quiet smile, her wet hair already washed and conditioned and combed back. The baby was in a bouncer by the toilet, running his fingers along the inside of the porcelain rim. The bathroom floor was slick with water. My husband—to whom every red cent of our fortune and every square inch of this ranch exclusively belonged—turned to me and whooped.
“Well, well, well,” he said grandly, in his good ol’ boy Western accent.
“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes, little lady.” The children shrieked in delight.
An impossible thing to imagine, what might happen if my husband ever paused and thought about the governing law of his own starry universe: his wife might as well have been a farm dog, for all the rights she had. Even the sweetest, stupidest man can grow cruel and cunning when he learns a thing like that.