Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 39

On a warm day in June, I met Producer Shannon at a coffee shop in town. Our interview was scheduled for the early afternoon. She was already there when I arrived, sitting at a corner table with two coffees. Her hair was colored a bright candy pink, pulled back into two messy pigtail braids. Her nose ring was a stud in the shape of a peace sign.

“I kept it black,” she said, pushing my coffee across the table. “I know you only use cream if it’s from your own cows.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised. “Thank you.”

It was true, I didn’t use factory-farm dairy, but I’d mentioned this preference only once on my Instagram account, and it was over a year ago.

don’t u realize how many people don’t have access to this???

Ew is she drinking milk straight outta the udder

Yikes i get that u live on a farm but this is honestly so out of touch

Omg YUM if only I could drink thru the screen!

So Shannon had been paying close attention to me for a while now. She was young, this girl, but she was not a child.

And me? I was thirty years old. Practically an old maid! Newly pregnant with our fifth child. Junebug. The account had just passed two million followers on Instagram. I’d just begun considering expanding to other platforms. Weeks earlier, I’d issued a callout for a producer position via my Instagram page. I received hundreds of applications. Nearly all of them came from women who looked like me. And then there was Shannon. When I clicked on her Instagram handle, I was certain there’d been some kind of error. That she’d linked the wrong account in her application or something. But no, there she was, ripped jeans and John Lennon sunglasses, smiling bitchily at the camera, the Brooklyn Bridge stretching wide behind her. The last kind of woman I would expect to want to work with a woman like me.

“So,” she said now. “Let’s talk about your account.” She cupped her coffee in both hands. Leaned forward, a glimmer in her hipster eye. “I think there’s something really radical about what you do, Natalie.”

I resisted the urge, as instinctual as a spasm, to tell her to call me Mrs. Heller Mills. “Oh?”

“Absolutely. Everyone at my school loves you, you know. They think you’re a feminist icon.”

For a moment my guard dropped. I leaned back and snorted. “ Really? ”

She laughed. “Hell yeah! I mean, no one I know wants to go spend their one wild and magical life being a shill for some billionaire tech asshole, just so they can get access to shitty healthcare and put away like five dollars a month for their retirement.”

“Just so they can breastfeed in a broom closet someday,” I added quickly. I was familiar with this game.

Shannon pointed a finger at my chest, dead-on, like a pistol. “Exactly. What they want is what you have, Natalie.”

“Which is what?”

She smiled and said softly, “Freedom, of course.”

Well then. This was new information. All this time, I’d been under the impression that there were only two kinds of women who followed me: liberal women who hated me and good Christian women who loved me. But now I watched with surprise as a third woman opened the door to my brain and sauntered in: young, radical, educated.

“So I’m—what?” I said. “Some kind of catharsis for girls your age?”

“It’s not catharsis,” Shannon said. “It’s more like a road map.” She was speaking with the kind of urgent self-seriousness that only a twenty-year-old can have. “What you’re doing on your farm, with the homesteading and the farm-to-table and the keeping your kids away from technology? Building a business with your husband, and owning all the means of production, and running it from the comfort of your house? That’s the future, Natalie. That’s the way out.”

“The way out of what?”

“Oh,” she said, like it was obvious. “The maze.”

That was what Shannon and her friends at school called it. The maze. When they went to a job fair and walked past the consulting booth, the military recruitment booth, the law school booth, they would elbow one another and whisper: Step right up, one-way ticket into the heart of the maze. When they sent articles to one another in their group chats, the latest op-ed about the impossibility of affording children as a working mother: This chick is stuck way deep in the maze.

Do you know what young women wanted these days?

Not to be a mother or a worker, at least not in any traditional sense. Certainly not to be both.

What they wanted was to do what I had seemingly done: take one step back, and then another. They wanted to backpedal slowly until they were back at the entrance of the maze, and then to turn around and walk away. To say, I want no part in this, and then to disappear.

What I didn’t say to Shannon: disappearing is an expensive magic trick. Did these girls have the funds to pull it off?

What I said instead was much simpler: “Go on.”

When I got home to the ranch that day, I turned off the car and sat in silence, looking up at my own house, trying to see it through Shannon’s eyes. What had she said about mazes, again? The delivery had been so intoxicating, so impossible to believe—already I was having trouble repeating it to myself. I considered calling Shannon and having her say it to me again, word by word, so I could remember. Instead, I texted her.

You’re hired

A week after her interview, Shannon showed up at the farm with two big suitcases. “I can’t believe I’m here,” she kept saying, after I hugged her in the driveway. “I can’t believe this place is actually real .”

I spread my arms out wide, gave a big twirl, then curtsied. I’d been working, lately, on being whimsical. From what I understood, this required saying things like whoopsie daisies, twirling around in prairie dresses, and throwing my head back and laughing hysterically at things that really weren’t that funny. “On behalf of the mountains and the chickens and cows and the kale and the kids,” I said grandly, “welcome to Yesteryear Ranch.”

“Holy shit,” Shannon said, and laughed. “You literally just gave me goose bumps.”

I shrugged, gave another half curtsy. “Shall we give you a tour?”

The children were still in their homeschooling lesson with Nanny Louise, so the house was quiet as I guided Shannon around. One of the first videos I wanted to tackle with Shannon was an official house tour, and this felt like perfect practice. “It’s not that fancy,” I said over my shoulder as we walked down the hallway and turned in to the living room, “but it’s perfect for our growing family.”

Shannon didn’t say anything. Her head moved on a swivel as she took in all the angles she’d witnessed through a phone, now fully dimensional in front of her. Objects in the mirror are closer than they may appear. “It’s so much smaller in real life.” She paused, seemed to realize what she said. “I didn’t mean in a bad way, I just meant—”

“It’s fine! It is a small house.” Deep inside me, buried beneath layers and layers of Online Natalie, my inner voice snarled up at her. Could you afford something this “small,” Shannon?

Shannon nodded, her gaze still roving. “We should highlight this more in your content. Consumerism is such a problem, and this is a great message: you don’t need a McMansion to have a big, happy family.”

I nodded sagely. “I hate waste.”

She made a noise of agreement, and my Online Natalie monitors flashed green. I had planned on showing her the nursery next, but it didn’t feel like the right time for Shannon to see the piles of boxes of Yesteryear Ranch merchandise piled up along the walls, the sweatshirts and snow globes and bread-making kits, the traitorous gold stickers that stamped each box: Made in China . We’d only just launched the online store, and already we were sold out of every product, receiving angry messages about purchases every day.

Hi i ordered a snow globe ten days ago and it says it still hasn’t shipped???

I just needed someone—Shannon, perhaps—to do the packaging and mailing. Later, though. Definitely later. For now: “Let’s drop your bags off!”

I showed Shannon the apartment above the barn, where she would be living. “The homeschooling room is on one side of the hallway, and your bedroom is on the other side.” We reached the top of the stairs and turned into the bedroom. “Here we are!” I opened the door, and Nanny Aimee looked up at me from the lower bunk bed. “Nanny Aimee,” I said, “this is Shannon.”

“Hi,” Nanny Aimee said.

I paused. A strange little girl was standing by the bed, playing with Nanny Aimee’s shoes. “Mama,” she said when she saw me.

Right. Of course. That was my little girl, Jessa. Growing so quickly these days! I just didn’t recognize her because of the location—and her hair, it was braided differently—and well—

Pregnancy brain!

I dropped to a crouch and spread my arms wide. “Hello, darling girl!”

She performed perfectly, crashing into my arms in an explosion of giggles. I gave her a big hug and a kiss, ignoring the smell—she needed a diaper change, or maybe a bath—and then sent her toddling back to Nanny Aimee. I stepped inside the room and gestured at the empty set of bunk beds opposite the nannies. My smile fell another fraction; the nannies were supposed to have made the bed already, but a pile of linens was still bundled on the mattress.

“Sorry,” Nanny Aimee said, reading my thoughts. “I was just about to do that. I was just busy with Jessa. She took a huge poo, and then I got her all changed, and then she did it again! Didn’t you, Jessy? Do we have to clean you again? Yes we do!”

Nanny Aimee was a resounding disappointment of a worker. She’d shown up at the house months earlier, wearing a tube top and jean shorts, all gum-snapping and vocal fry. When I called the agency to complain, they told me they were running short on options. No one wanted to work these days.

“I didn’t know you have two nannies.” Shannon gave a nervous laugh. “I didn’t even know you had one .”

Nanny Aimee was looking up at us with a cool, unblinking stare, like a cat blinking lazily out from their sunlit perch. “We cleared out the bottom three drawers for you,” she said and pointed at the bureau. Jessa copied her, grinning and pointing. There was, I was noticing now, a smear of dried poop on her chubby little thigh.

Shannon didn’t say anything. She was staring at the bunk.

“Can you clean Jessa up?” I said to Nanny Aimee. “We’ll be right back.” Then I shut the door so Shannon and I were alone in the hallway. “Is everything okay?”

“It’s just.” She gestured helplessly at the closed door. “It’s a really small room. I don’t even know if my bags will fit.”

“Well,” I said. A thin smile spread wide across my face. Not a choice so much as a reflex. A drawing and quartering of the face. “The thing is, Shannon: I’m paying you a great salary.” I wasn’t, but what does a nineteen-year-old know about wages? “I’m not even charging you for room and board. You’re saving everything you make.”

“Right,” Shannon said, after a moment.

“You’re going to love the nannies, anyways. You probably just made two future best friends.”

Forward, Online Natalie roared.

“Let’s go see the fields!”

It was midday, the sun blazing overhead, as Shannon and I marched up to the far paddocks, where Caleb was working. “You’ll want to wear bug spray all the time,” I said to Shannon, my voice nearly drowned out by the drone of cicadas. “This place is tick city in the summertime. We keep canisters of deet in the barn that you can use.”

“I thought you’re against chemicals?”

“Caleb,” I called, when we reached the top of the hillside. He was motoring along in our new tractor. He killed the engine when he saw us. As he hopped out and began to cross the field to us, I turned to Shannon, smiling wide. “Well? What do you think?”

What Shannon was supposed to say next was some version of I can’t believe how much land you own, or I can’t believe how beautiful this place is. Instead, she stared with a distracted expression at the far end of the field, where the Home Depot workers were standing by a John Deere trailer, taking their lunch break.

Too much time passed. My smile hung on my face like a hangnail.

“It’s quite an operation,” she said finally.

Then Caleb was there, saying hello with a big cowboy grin. “Nice to meet you, Brooklyn,” he drawled. I swallowed the urge to punch him in the mouth.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s actually Shannon?”

Caleb’s expression faltered. He dropped the accent. “I know that, I just—it’s a nickname. Like, big-city girl? You’re from Brooklyn, aren’t you?”

“Oh,” Shannon said. “Ha. Yeah. I get it now.” She kicked the dust, squinted up at the sun.

“Bet you’re happy to be out of New York, anyways,” Caleb said. “What with all those rats.”

“Excuse me?”

“There are more rats in New York than there are people. That’s why everyone’s sick all the time. The rats.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“Well, I’m sure you know that New Yorkers have historically had terrible oxygen flow to their brains. That’s why the population is so dumb. For years, scientists couldn’t figure out why, until finally they realized what it was.” Caleb paused meaningfully.

Shannon ventured weakly, “The rats?”

“Exactly. The rats.”

Shannon looked helplessly to me, and I gave her my best we’re-all-God’s-creatures smile. “Caleb has a lot of fascinating little theories about the world! I’m sure he’ll tell you all about them at another time. Now that you’ve met, we should get back to—”

“Can I actually ask a question?”

“Oh.” Absolutely not. “Of course!”

Please, Lord, don’t let her ask about the rats.

“How many people work here?”

Caleb and I looked at each other. “I’d say we’re at about twenty part-time heads,” he said, “give or take, but that changes quite a bit on a seasonal basis.” Good man.

“Wow,” Shannon said. “Interesting.”

Here it was, another moment that should have gone one way— Shannon smiling brightly: I can’t wait to dig in! —and instead swerved sharply in the opposite direction: she pulled a camera from her bag and pointed the lens at the workers across the field. The metallic sound that followed was deafening: cla-chink.

This was when I realized I’d made a mistake.