Chapter 48 #2
A good Christian husband and father would have no problem silencing a liar, a cheat, a filthy little whore.
A good Christian man would stand up, cross the room in a single swift movement, and slap Shannon with an open palm.
For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it …
He would wrap his hands around that selfish bitch’s neck and manually squeeze the air right out of her selfish bitch throat, and meanwhile, back home, his wife would be cleaning the countertops. Thinking about her husband. Worrying.
I really did feel like I was falling. I stared at my hands, trying to make sense of their purchase on Shannon’s neck.
I was straddling her on the bed, and she was squirming desperately beneath me.
Feet kicking. Her skin was hot beneath my sweaty palms. Rosebud underwear fully exposed, now.
Jeans halfway down her thighs. From all the movement, I supposed.
She was making an awful whining sound, her fingers fluttering frantically around my grip.
My grip.
My grip?
No. That can’t be right.
But it was. I was squeezing her throat so hard that my knuckles had gone white. It was the recognition of this fact more than anything that caused me to let go. Shannon gasped. I sat back as her hands went where mine had just been, as if to feel for the grooves my grip had left behind.
Morning, y’all! You’ll never believe the morning I’ve had …
I got off the bed, readjusting my blouse, folding back the collar, and smoothing the wrinkles away. One of the buttons on my shirt was missing. It must have popped off when I was—or rather when she was—
No matter. It was a misplaced button. A wrinkled blouse. These were small things. The button, the blouse. Each could be replaced.
“You’re upset,” I said, over Shannon’s panicked sobs. “I should give you some space. You mean so much to us, Shannon. Really.”
She was saying something, but I couldn’t entirely make it out. This ranch is something.
“What is it, Shannon?” I said patiently. “What are you trying to say?”
This ranch, this ranch.
“Spit it out!” I said merrily. “I don’t have all day.”
Shannon looked at me with a terrified, tear-streaked face. “This ranch,” she said, with willful slowness, “is cursed.”
I allowed myself to think, for one long second: I should have strangled you to death.
Then I smiled wide, and the thought fell away, like a scrap of paper fluttering over the side of a cliff.
“I’m sorry you feel that way. Why don’t you take a half day to yourself?
Relax. Take a nap. You can meet me in the kitchen at one.
” I cocked my head like a good boss, a generous boss. You’re welcome.
I turned to leave, then remembered something. “Oh, I meant to ask: Are you pregnant?”
If she was, then of course we would get rid of it. Take her to another state. Bring her to a doctor we trusted. Doug would know how to find one. It was a shame. It broke my heart to even think about! But the Lord would certainly understand.
“No,” Shannon said, still rubbing her neck. “I’m not pregnant.” She wiped the tears from her cheek, glaring at me like—like—
Like my own daughter, I realized, right as she added softly, “I would never be stupid enough to have a child with that man.”
By the time I stepped outside and into the sunlight, I was grinning so fiercely my cheeks hurt. A sudden nausea overtook me.
Sometimes it makes me sick, how perfect my—and how good I—
I stepped back, and back again, until I was leaning against the barn wall.
“Mama, what’s wrong?”
The world was so bright it felt broken, like a lamp without a shade.
I frowned, trying to see straight. Squinted down to see two boys looking up at me.
I looked up and past them to find two barns, two houses, two sets of two nannies playing with two sets of children.
I blinked rapidly, lifted my head back, and stared up into a pair of snake-eyed suns, which blazed madly from a double-helix sky.
“Mama.”
He’s not as dumb as you think.
Mama?
They’ll never forgive you.
Mamamamamamamamamama—
I would never be stupid enough to have a child with that man.
My gaze spun across the landscape, circling the mountains and the paddocks and the barns and landing back again on my little boys. No, just one boy. My son. Samuel. The future man of the house! I tried to smile, swallowed a scream.
Mama?
A man may work from sun to sun—
Get up, Natalie.
In the name of the father, son, and homewrecker cunt—
Doug answered my call on the seventh ring.
I was sitting in the pantry in the dark, just a sliver of light visible through the crack in the tightly shut door. My back was pressed uncomfortably against the large plastic containers that held our baking materials. “It’s time for Caleb to run for office.”
“Pardon?”
“He needs to run for office. Immediately.” The thought had occurred to me as I was power walking back to the house.
What had Doug said to me nearly a decade earlier, that strange night at the Mill Estate?
He could be pretty perfect for politics some day …
one of the few positions of power where it benefits you to underthink.
“He threatened to leave me last night, Doug. He said he’s in love with Shannon. ”
“I see,” Doug said, after a long moment. “And what is her status at the present moment?”
It was easy to imagine Doug, standing still in the middle of a bustling office, a big campaign poster behind him (civil war is coming), a half dozen interns crowded around him in a semicircle, all holding up sticky notes to convey their own deeply urgent messages.
Mine, of course, was the most urgent of all the messages, and so his hand was probably lifted to them, a single finger of pause.
“I confronted her this morning,” I said. “It was—it didn’t go well.” A sob escaped me.
“What do you mean exactly?”
“She doesn’t want to run away with him. But there was … there was an altercation.”
“Ah!” he said brightly. “I see what you mean now. That is very interesting. Let me just get somewhere more quiet—”
I sat there in the darkness of the pantry, listening as Doug walked impatiently through the office, saying not now and give me five to the faceless interns still chasing after him.
And then there was the click shut of a door, and the white noise of the campaign office was gone, and Doug’s voice was close and shallow in my ear, each word hitting my eardrums with the exaggerated echo of water droplets in a cave. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
“It’s hard to describe.”
“Find a way to describe it.”
Through the darkness, I could just see the shadows of the containers on the wall opposite me, lined up in neat little rows. Like jury members. Watching closely.
I’m always being watched, I thought calmly. I will never get away. And the Lord—the pressure of His attention was so heavy on the crown of my head, it felt like the earth’s gravity had doubled in weight.
“I sort of … hit her,” I told the jars, and Him, and Doug. “Or threatened her. Physically. But it wasn’t—” I paused, held the phone away from my face, sobbing quietly into the fabric of my sweater. “I tried to—I didn’t mean to—I put my hands on her, Doug. I put my hands on her neck.”
The phone was silent. The jar of brown sugar leaned over to the flour: You believe the nerve of this bitch?
The Lord was silent. So was my father-in-law.
“Doug: Are you listening? Are you still there?”
The flour shrugged. These women have so much free time, they lose their minds.
“I’m just thinking,” Doug snapped. “Let me think.”
We, the members of the pantry-jar jury, have come to a unanimous verdict …
I covered my eyes with a cool palm.
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
Finally Doug spoke. “Does she come from money?”
I considered what I knew. “She’s definitely not poor.”
“All right. We’ll give her a promotion and a bonus. A new contract.”
“I don’t think she’ll sign it.”
“Of course she will,” Doug said impatiently. “It usually takes a few of these instances before someone actually decides to leave.”
Of course Doug had dealt with this before.
“Listen,” he went on. “There’s a special election in California right now.
A state senator died of cancer, and his wife is running uncontested to fill his seat.
We can beat her, easy, but we need to be prepared for the consequences of success.
Which brings me to a very important question: Do you think Caleb is ready to win? ”
Of course I didn’t. Of course he wasn’t. But I would rather give my idiot husband clearance to our nation’s nuclear codes than find myself a single, homeless, divorced mother of five with a sixth on the way. My reputation destroyed. Barely a dollar to my name.
Well, maybe a few dollars. The last time I’d checked that private account, I had seventy thousand dollars. It was growing so slowly, I could leach only the smallest percentage each month, and I had thought—well, of course the account was for Caleb, I hadn’t ever planned on actually using it, and—
Anyways. There wasn’t enough.
“Yes,” I said. “Caleb is ready to win.”
“Okay. If we do this, we have to move quickly. Head Shannon off. Give her some money and a revised agreement. The nicer we are to her, the more of a headache a lawsuit will seem. In the meantime we have to get Caleb to announce his candidacy in a week or less. We’re walking on thin ice now.
We need to listen for the cracks. Speaking of: Do you currently have a PR firm on retainer? Or do we need to get one?”
“I don’t need a PR firm. I know how to represent myself.”
Doug barked out a laugh. “Damn straight you need a PR firm. Do you have any idea how likable you have to be to pull a situation like this off?”
Who the fuck are you to say I’m not likable enough? You horrible man, imbecile, asshole, if it weren’t for me your son would be dead in a ditch somewhere!
There was a long silence on the phone.
It took about ten seconds for me to even realize what had happened. “I’m sorry, Doug. I didn’t mean to say that. It was”—never meant to be uttered aloud, I don’t know how the wires got so crossed—“I’m sorry. I’m—I’m just very upset.”
Another long silence. “Well,” he said. “Like I said: you definitely need some help on the PR side.”
I was staring, terrified, into the darkness. That had never happened before—but now that it had, I felt a horrifying awareness of the thin membrane between what I thought and what I said. Had I broken some irreplaceable seal?
“Talk soon,” Doug said.
“I’m sorry,” I rushed to say again, but my father-in-law had already hung up.