Chapter 38 #2
“I’m good.” I was caught, now. I didn’t want to prove her theory correct, and yet I needed to know, and the words came tumbling out of me before I could stop them. “Why don’t you follow me on Instagram?”
There was a pause on the line. “That’s why you’re calling?”
“It’s not a big deal. I’m just curious.”
“Oh, you know I don’t spend much time on Instagram.” This was true. Her own account had four pictures, all of staged family photos. She had less than a hundred followers. “I’m so busy right now, with the kids and nursing school and Ben—I don’t have time for all that.”
“That’s not really an answer to the question, though, is it?”
“It’s just—” She sighed. I heard her say to someone, “One minute.” Then she was walking, and the sound of other voices was falling away as she said quietly into the receiver, “Look, I don’t want to fight.
I know we’ve had arguments over the years, but I’m really just trying to … simplify my life. You know?”
“Of course I know.” I had no clue what she was talking about.
“But—it’s just confusing, okay? The way you act on that account, it makes me feel like I’m having a stroke. Like someone body-snatched my only sister.”
“That’s a little bit dramatic, Abigail.”
“Okay. Maybe it is. But it’s how I feel. I’ve been going to therapy, you know, and—”
“Therapy?”
“Yes. Therapy. I told Mama she should go too, and she said she would consider it.”
“Who’s paying for this therapy? Is it that man you’ve been seeing? Ben?”
“Natalie—”
“You’re confessing all your secrets to some random man, and you think what I’m doing is strange?”
“It’s a woman.”
“What?”
“The therapist I’m confessing all my secrets to,” she replied flatly. “She’s a woman. And she says it’s fine for me not to follow you online. Anyways, I have to go, Natalie. Give hugs to the kids and Caleb for me, okay?” And then she hung up.
Infuriating. I’d been straining for a fight, but she was like water. I couldn’t get a grip on anything.
And then of course there was Caleb. “Turns out we made a lot of money last month,” he said one day. We were in the kitchen. It was late afternoon. Nanny Louise had been living with us for a week.
I was sitting at the table with my notebook, mapping out the plans for a rhubarb pie tutorial when he spoke. I paused and looked at him. “Did we?”
“Yeah, some sort of buyer called QuickCash paid us eighty thousand. Can you believe that? Need to call the accountants, though, ’cause I’m not sure they actually bought any of our vegetables. Must be some kind of processing mistake.”
Caleb was looking at me closely now. Scrutinizing me.
It was a kind of look that hadn’t existed in his inventory of looks when we got married.
But like my closet of smiles, Caleb had grown his own garden of expressions: a thousand variations of suspicion.
That was what they taught you in the forums: to be suspicious of everything.
I’d watched Caleb grow suspicious of schools, and then of the skies, and then of the world—and now, I realized with surprise, he was becoming suspicious of me.
“Do you know what QuickCash is, Nattie?”
I feigned uncertainty. “I think that’s the name of the payment-processing system for Instagram.”
“Are we making that much money on Instagram?”
There it was: that one single word I’d been dreading. We.
“I guess we did this month!” I said, with as much stupid housewife energy as I could muster. “Wow!”
“What about the month before?”
“Oh.” My gaze cast across the kitchen, as if the correct answer might present itself to me. “I’m not sure. I guess I’d have to go online and check.”
“Well. I spoke to our accountants and they said the money, that eighty thousand, was scheduled to go into some random banking account they didn’t have access to, which must have been some sort of mistake. Right?”
He was looking hard at me now. Like he didn’t believe I was real.
Stupid. What a stupid idea. So reckless and immoral. What had I been thinking? What kind of woman tries to hide money from her husband?
There were only two possible answers to that question, and neither was acceptable:
1) She is a woman who doesn’t trust her husband.
2) She is a woman who doesn’t want to share.
“Right,” I said finally. “Silly me. Pregnancy brain!”
Pregnancy brain. The latest phrase I’d been trying out, which—if the fury it elicited from the Angry Women was any indication—appeared to be perfectly fermented.
“That’s what I thought,” Caleb said, and chuckled.
“Pregnancy brain. So anyways, I asked them to see if any other payments had been forwarded to that bank account, and what do you know: they had! Every payment from QuickCash for the last four months has gone into that account. Two hundred and twenty thousand in total.” He laughed.
“That’s a whole lot of pregnancy brain!”
I was feeling very cold now.
“Anyways. They fixed it, so the money will go straight into our official LLC account from now on.”
“Thank you so much for—clearing that up. Do you know—I’m just going to go to the bathroom for a moment—”
I didn’t turn around, but I felt his gaze on me until I turned the corner.
Once I was safely inside the bathroom, I turned the faucet on and looked at myself in the mirror.
I felt incredibly nauseous and a little bit lightheaded.
“Stop it,” I said quietly. “Stop feeling this way.” But the nausea wouldn’t go away, and the pressure in my chest was unbearable. I was finding it hard to breathe.
Maybe it’s just sickening, how perfect my life is.
I paused. The pressure in my chest lightened a bit. My Online Natalie sensors flickered green, and I pushed dizzyingly forward.
Sometimes it actually makes me nauseous, how satisfying—no, how perfect my life is, and how good I am at living it.
That would do.
The problem was that Caleb couldn’t be trusted with money.
Really, he couldn’t. He spent it on all manner of stupid things for the farm.
Which is why I called Instagram support that night, waiting forty-five minutes on hold to speak with a human to ask them if they could split the incoming payments before they even hit my checking account.
Yes, I told them in a whisper. That’s right: I wanted to split the payments between the checking account and another one I’d just opened.
For Caleb, of course. I was doing it for him.