Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 38

Louise Crenshaw arrived at the farm on a blustery spring morning wearing a peacoat, holding an old-fashioned suitcase in one hand. I was thrilled with how perfectly she fit the aesthetic of the role she needed to fill. Our very own Mary Poppins! “Hello there,” she said to Clementine, and stuck out her hand.

We were standing in the corner of the living room where the children kept their toys. “Hello there,” Clementine echoed, and shook Louise’s hand. She gestured formally at her doll set. “Would you like to have tea with me?”

Nanny Louise nodded. “Absolutely I would.”

She dropped down to a crouch, letting the children gather around her like townspeople encountering a stranger from a foreign land.

“So,” she said, while Samuel surveyed her, nose to nose, with an appraising look. Hard to believe my oldest boy is nearly four! “My agency says you’re an influencer?”

I laughed brightly. “Sort of. I don’t think of myself like one, but I guess it’s technically true.”

She poked Samuel in the tummy, and he burst into hysterics. Stetson now toddled over and presented his tummy to her. Hard to believe my youngest boy is nearly —wait, no, I had used that line already. Well: Stetson was two. She poked his tummy, and both boys screamed with terrified delight. Over their laughter, she said, “What do you sell?”

“Well, up until now it’s just been paid advertisements, but I’m planning a cookware line. Mixing bowls, cutting boards, preserved foods. That kind of thing. Direct to consumer. So much work to plan.”

I gave a self-deprecating grimace and held the expression in place, patiently, until she turned around and looked at me. Then my face morphed into bright laughter again, and she laughed politely too.

It was working. My first extended interaction with a stranger since that awful day with the woman in the parking lot—and this time I was actually doing it. Being Online Natalie in real life. Nanny Louise didn’t exactly seem thrilled by me, but that was irrelevant. I didn’t care if she liked me. I just cared if she believed I was real.

“Well,” I said. “I’ll just let you get to it, then!” Best to leave when ahead. “Oh, and what’s your Instagram handle? I’d love to follow you!”

“Oh. I don’t have Instagram, actually.”

“Ah,” I said. “Well. Never mind.”

This was the strangeness of becoming famous online. I had a million followers, I could access more people in a single moment than any European king of the last thousand years, and then someone could effortlessly wipe my entire kingdom away with a single sentence: I don’t have Instagram.

“And if you don’t mind,” Nanny Louise added, “I’d love to stay out of any content you share online.”

“Of course. I totally understand those boundaries.” I wondered if she had seen the email I sent to the agency— nannies will NEVER be visible on account, and they will sign a contract stipulating so —or if this was genuinely just a perfect coincidence.

Clementine was pouring Louise an imaginary cup of tea now. Louise took it, sipped politely, then said over her shoulder, “Who has been doing the homeschooling for the children up until this point?”

“Ah! That would be my husband.”

“And you’re aware of the curriculum he chose for the children?”

“Of course I am.” This was vaguely correct. It would be a stretch to call what Caleb did with the children a curriculum, but from time to time I did see him on the couch with Clementine and a laptop, the screen open to some online website with poor HTML formatting. From what I understood, the endeavor had something to do with learning math through the moral framework of the Ten Commandments. Thou Shalt Not Divide by Zero, et cetera.

“It’s very ideologically driven,” Louise said. “I just want to make sure you’re aware, and comfortable with that?”

“Oh yes. Perfectly comfortable!” I grinned at my daughter, who stared soberly back at me. “Well, Clementine, what do you think? Would you like to play with Nanny Louise for a while—”

“Actually,” Louise said, “Louise is just fine.”

“Excuse me?”

“You said Nanny Louise. Louise is fine.”

Well. That wouldn’t do. I’d been really looking forward to calling her Nanny Louise. It sounded more magical, like we were living in a storybook. It doesn’t matter, I told myself, she’ll never be online, the Angry Women will never meet her —but it did matter. It mattered to me.

These moments happened frequently now. Spending so much time online, I sometimes found myself actively uncomfortable, almost revolted, by the discombobulation of my offline life. The piles of dishes in the sink. The silent watchful eye of my daughter, no musical overlay to soften our interactions. And now: Louise is just fine. Terrible. Like rubbing velvet the wrong way.

I gathered myself, then said firmly, “I’d really like to call you Nanny Louise.”

There was the slightest pause. Then she shrugged. “Okay. And your littlest one? Where is she?”

“Jessa!” I said. “Our little firecracker. She’s sleeping. I’ll bring her to you at three.”

Jessa was barely a year old, not so much a firecracker as a mushy puddle of need and want—but I’d needed a way to differentiate her online, a way for the Angry Women to know and remember her, and she had been very fussy lately, and so the moniker had stuck.

“Great,” Louise said, and her attention turned back to the children.

I walked away from the living room, through the kitchen, and into the pantry. The tension in my chest fell away, so suddenly and powerfully that I lowered myself to the ground, letting the pleasure roll through me in waves.

I would never be alone with my children again.

What a beautiful time to be alive. It was springtime. The ranch was bursting at the seams with life. The fields were freckled with bluebonnets. On a quiet day, sapped of wind, you could tilt your ear and hear the river, rushing and foaming with all the snow runoff from the mountains. But it was the kind of beauty that felt impossible to grasp in person. It wasn’t just an option to organize this moment in the walled structure of a phone screen—it was essential. The best way to experience it.

If only my mother agreed.

“It just seems very…ostentatious,” she had said when we met a week earlier for coffee. “Do you really want so many people seeing Jessa in a diaper?”

I shrugged mildly. I already felt quite certain that my children were far safer online—their best selves preserved inside the four walls of my phone like little bugs in amber—than they could ever be in the real world. I thought of the woman at the grocery store, her disturbed expression. Even the cruelest comment I received online was no match for the memory of her face. “I think you just don’t understand how social media works.”

“But what if someone develops a fascination with them? Or with you?”

“You mean like a kidnapper or something?”

She nodded nervously.

“Mother. I highly doubt I’m important enough for someone to kidnap. Do you know how many accounts online have tens of millions of followers, let alone hundreds of millions ?”

She looked stricken at the thought. “I don’t know,” she said, giving me a wobbly, disoriented look. “Maybe…five?”

It was also at this coffee date my mother told me Abigail was seeing someone. “A pastor, actually. He’s helping her study for her GED!”

“A pastor,” I said, and laughed. “What kind of pastor would date a single mother?”

“Well.” She sipped her coffee. “We’ve been going to a new church, actually.”

“A new church?” My mother had gone to the same church for my whole life. “What do you mean, a new church?”

“It’s very…hip. This pastor, his name is Ben—he doesn’t believe divorce is a sin. And he thinks—well.” She leaned forward and said quietly, “He feels very strongly that the gays should feel welcome, just like anyone else.”

I said nothing. Just looked at her, waiting for her to add her own opinion. Which was surely different than Pastor Ben’s opinion. This, after all, was the woman who had grabbed my hand and dragged me across the street in town whenever we passed the local bookshop, which was, in her words, owned by a man with a little too much spring in his step.

Instead, she shrugged and said innocently, “His arguments are compelling.”

Each person in my inner circle was responding to my sudden fame differently. Doug was obsessed with the newfound access I had to the minds of American women. My mother was worried about the children. My mother-in-law hadn’t offered her opinion yet; ever since she finished drying out in Wyoming, her conversational endeavors had been cut in half. In the handful of times I’d seen her since, she’d spoken only in short, raspy bursts and was constantly licking her lips, like she was dying of thirst.

And my sister?

I realized at coffee with my mother that I didn’t know what my sister thought of my virality. We barely spoke beyond occasional small talk on the family group chat. I logged onto Instagram to her account and let out a little gasp: Abigail wasn’t following me anymore.

I called her on the drive back from town. She answered on the eighth ring. “Natalie,” she said, “what a surprise.” She was outside; I could hear birds and children shouting and the distant, punctuated shriek of a referee whistle. “What can I do for you?”

“Do I need a specific reason to call my sister?”

“ You do, yes.” They were the three sharpest words she’d ever said to me, and yet her voice was strangely cheery. I wondered if people were standing all around her right now, maybe even Pastor Ben. If so, then my mother’s voice was surely ringing in her head: Never cause a scene!

“Well,” I said. “That hardly seems fair.”

“Okay.” I could hear her shrug through the phone. “My mistake, then. What’s up? How are you?”

“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.