Chapter 28 #2
“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.