Chapter 30
The morning that my sister and mother were set to leave, my mother asked me to take a walk with her in the fields.
We left Abigail where she was, lying on the couch, watching cartoons sullenly with the children, and were barely halfway across the driveway when my mother said, “How are you doing, Natalie?”
I tried to match her display of warmth. “I’m fine. How are you?”
She sighed and stopped walking, and I reluctantly stopped too. We were standing by the barn, facing the mountains, while she fiddled nervously with the cross on her necklace. “Lord, bless mothers with daughters,” she muttered.
“You clearly have something to say,” I said brightly. “So spit it out. Please.”
“Well. I’m worried about you.”
“You’re worried about me. You’re worried about me? When Abigail’s over there threatening to get”—I lowered my voice to a forceful whisper, even though we were alone—“divorced?”
She gave a helpless shrug. “It’s my fault. The way I raised you both all alone, no father figure in the house—I thought it would all work out, but maybe it wasn’t … right.”
As my mother launched into her monologue, I felt a combination of humiliation and fury lift me out of my body. My spirit rose until it was hovering by the roof of the barn.
… Worried about the children …
… not sure why you’re renovating a house that’s already …
… farming is not something to be taken so …
… a very nice man, but I’m worried that he might be …
It was a deeply painful monologue to receive, and I’m sure for my mother to deliver. I was suddenly shocked, nearly bowled over, by how utterly pathetic the situation was. The situation meaning my life. My children, my husband, my home. Yesteryear Ranch. Our stupid fucking farm.
Why had I thought this would work?
She was right, of course. I’d known it all along, in the quietest part of me: we were failing at make-believe. My husband was not a natural John Wayne. I was not an effortless housewife. We could fool our loved ones from afar, but up close, you could smell it. Something rotten in the air.
While my mother went on, I cast my gaze out across the fields.
In the far distance, Caleb was tending to his zucchini plants.
Worthless vegetables. We might as well have been growing pennies.
At that moment, he stood up and waved cheerfully.
My mother paused her speech—something about Clementine and her ill-fitting dress, so sad, could I really not take the time to find the poor thing something in her size?
—and the two of us, trained in politeness as we were, both waved cheerfully back.
A new thought came to me, the most alarming of all: it wouldn’t be easy to get my husband to give this up. He loved the farm. He didn’t notice the smell, or if he did, he wasn’t bothered by it. He was never going to leave, which meant—
Doug was never going to make him leave. Of course he wasn’t.
For months, I’d been eyeing our three-year anniversary nervously, wondering what would happen when we got there, if Doug would cut us off financially.
Now I realized that had been a meaningless fear.
He didn’t care if the farm became profitable, not actually.
He’d already gotten what he wanted: a corner of the world to sweep his son into.
A little padded jail cell. It was merely a bonus that the jail cell in question sounded quite nice in a speech.
No, Doug would never stop giving us money.
He would simply give us less, and less, and less.
Which meant that I was stuck here. Trapped.
Alone in the middle of nowhere with—God help me—my husband and children, in perpetuity, slowly creeping toward poverty.
A crest of panic swelled in me. I gazed tearfully at the sky. There were no other choices, Lord. You brought me here. You dropped every breadcrumb. You wouldn’t leave me alone now, would you?
“You’re doing so much, Natalie,” my mother said. “I just think you might have bitten off a little more than you can chew. Your friends are worried about you, you know.”
“Friends?” My mother and I both knew I didn’t have friends.
“Vanessa. From track? She saw Caleb selling your vegetables at the farmers market, and she was kind enough to point out that you really can’t do that, sweetie, if the vegetables aren’t organic.”
“But they are organic.”
“She said she saw a pesticide barrel in a corner of one of your photos.”
“She’s lying!” My face was so warm I was practically panting.
“Well. Honey.” My mother stared meaningfully behind me, and I turned around to see a pesticide barrel by the barn.
A flare of anger whistled through me, so hot and painful I nearly gasped.
Those dumb fucking immigrants. Idiot Mexicans.
They never cleaned up after themselves, no matter how many times I asked.
Don’t tell Caleb, I nearly said to my mother.
He thought our produce was organic. It was important to him that our produce was organic—more important, apparently, than turning a profit.
After the third season of failed crops, I’d taken matters into my own hands.
Told the workers to spray the fields at night.
Told them to be very intentional with hiding the barrels.
Doug was right. What a border problem we had!
“It was really nice of Vanessa to mention, you know,” my mother went on. “She was worried about you. The fines for that kind of … confusion can send a business into the poorhouse.”
“What exactly do you want me to do, Mother?”
What she wanted was exactly what she wanted for my sister, too: to sweep the mess into a closet, shut the door, and lock it. “I just want you to be happy,” she said.
There it was again, that pointless word.
“Of course I’m happy,” I said angrily. “Don’t I look happy?”
An hour later, Caleb and the kids and I stood in the driveway waving goodbye, the one working brake light on that piece of shit van blinking rapidly at us as it halted its way down the hill.
It felt like receiving a message in Morse code.
Pull-your-life-to-geth-er. I swallowed the urge to pick up a rock and knock out the second brake light, silencing my mother’s last effort at communication.
“Well, that was fun,” Caleb said, right as Samuel started to wail and squirm in my arms. The poor child was hungry, probably, or tired, or constipated. Who knew. Certainly not me!
“Mama,” Clementine said. She tugged on my skirts. “Mama. Mama.”
Samuel wailed louder, a piercing shriek that struck my nervous system and reverberated through my body like a whacked funny bone.
“Mama. Mama. Mama.”
I looked down at Clementine. “What?”
She seemed surprised by my attention. She hesitated, then said quietly, “I want to live at Auntie Abigail’s house.”
I could’ve slapped her for that. Really, I could have.
“What’s for dinner, anyways?” Caleb said.
“I want to live with my cousins,” Clementine added. “I want to play tag.”
The world was so small in that moment, the sky so fully sapped of oxygen, that it felt like someone had wrapped my head in plastic wrap and was patiently waiting for me to suffocate to death.
“Mama.”
“Nattie?”
“Mama. Mama!”
What would Reena do?
The thought snuck in before I could stop it.
How would someone like Reena respond to such breathtaking humiliation?
She’d probably drink a coffee mug’s worth of vodka, draw a wobbly lipstick arc around the general area of her lips, and go galloping after a man who didn’t want her.
Not exactly a useful example. But what about the other, smarter girls in our dorm hall, who rotated through boyfriends seasonally?
The girls who Reena tried and failed to be?
The answer came down from on high: they would post a thirst trap.
thirst trap (noun, slang) : a social media post, especially a selfie or other photo, intended to elicit sexual attention, appreciation of one’s attractiveness, or other positive feedback.
Example: A photo of a proud, thin, youthful-looking Christian woman standing with her growing litter in front of a five-million-dollar barn. Cheese!
“I want another baby,” I said to Caleb, over Samuel’s furious cries. “And I want to take a picture.”
I didn’t know which request Caleb was addressing, and perhaps he didn’t either, when he said confusedly, “Right now?”
“Yes,” I snapped. “Right now.”
I stood with a cranky Clementine and a wailing Samuel in front of the barn while Caleb took a series of horrible pictures. Each time he handed me the phone, I looked at the photo with shocked dismay. “Forget it,” I snapped finally. “Just—forget it. I’ll do it myself. Take the baby.”
I stood there in the driveway and snapped three hundred selfies of myself, my baby screaming, my husband and daughter standing nervously in the background like hostages waiting to be shot. “What are you doing, Mama?” Clementine said, over and over again. “What are you doing?”
Finally I roared QUIET.
Even Samuel was startled into silence. Then it was just the sound of the wind and the creaking trees and an eagle crying in the distance while I pressed the soundless capture button, again and again and again.
Eventually Clementine and Caleb started walking away.
The baby was getting cold, he said. That was when I finally got the money shot: a close-up of my face, my cheeks berry-pink, smiling at the lens while my family walked away from me toward the barn.
I looked—yes, startled by my own life; like I might burst into laughter at the sight of so many blessings behind me, the children and the husband and the big red barn.
I looked like another woman entirely, my family like another family, this farm like another farm.
I wrote a caption—sometimes I can’t believe this is my ACTUAL, HONEST-TO-GOD LIFE!—and then I pressed post.
It was the most important day of my life. The day I stopped working on my husband, my farm, my family, and returned to work on an old, beloved project: myself.
I walked back inside to make dinner for my family.
After dinner, I knocked myself up again.