Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 40

The morning after Shannon’s arrival, I woke up and knew I had to fire her.

I’d barely slept the night before. I couldn’t stop replaying all the expressions that had flashed across her face throughout our tour: the disappointment when she muttered, It’s smaller than it looks online; the confusion when she said, How many people work here? That damning, double-stutter click of the camera as she captured the workers on film. Like the sound of a prison gate locking shut: cla-chink.

By the time I made it downstairs, I was running through the goodbye speech in my head. Unfortunately it isn’t a good fit. Of course, we’ll pay for your ticket home. Oh, and can you give me that roll of film before you go?

Then I turned the corner into the kitchen and stopped short. Shannon was eating breakfast with the children and the nannies.

“Good morning,” I said.

The chorus swelled lazily in response. Morning, Mama.

I walked around the table, my hand carrying across the heads of my children. Usually it comforted me, moving through my morning routine, settling into the shape of Online Natalie—but today the shape felt wrong, too tight, like a sweater put through the wrong wash cycle. I rolled my shoulders back instinctually, as if I might shrug the shape of myself into proper place, but still, I felt like I had my neck through an armhole. “Shannon,” I said, “you don’t have to wake up this early! You aren’t meant to start work until nine.”

Too sharp. Too high. Lower your voice.

Shannon pointed to the kitchen sink, where the camera equipment was already set up. “I was thinking that we should try to film earlier in the mornings, if we can. Better light.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t think I’ll be ready in time for that today.”

“No worries! We can just do a run-through. Very informal.”

She smiled at me. I smiled at her.

“Okay!” I said finally. “And your accommodations were all right?”

“Oh! You were actually totally right. Aimee and Louise are amazing. We stayed up all night talking about everything.” She exchanged a flirty little look with the nannies, who both suddenly seemed to be swallowing laughter. “Truly,” Shannon added, giving Nanny Louise a cat-ate-the-canary look, “I feel like I’ve been living here for years.”

I got dressed and came back downstairs, by which point the children were off to their homeschooling lesson and Shannon was standing in the kitchen, alone. “Why don’t we try some bread content?”

I reached for the sourdough starter.

“Turn your chin ten degrees toward me.”

I paused. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that hiring a producer would mean taking orders from them, too. I rotated my chin ten degrees, like a marionette doll, expression frozen in concentrated delight.

“That’s good,” Shannon murmured. “Now glance out the window when you can, like you’re looking for the kids. Just a quick little look—yes, that’s perfect. Soft smile, then maybe a small frown, because it’s hard, what you’re doing, it takes effort …”

I looked out the window at nothing. Smiled at the invisible children. Returned my gaze to the mixing bowl and sighed happily.

“Keep going,” Shannon whispered. “Just like that.”

Shannon showed me a rough cut of the footage a few hours later. The video was exactly like the other ones I’d done in recent months, only 20 percent better. Somehow, the light in the room looked rarefied, almost grainy; you could see flecks of dust floating through a stripe of sunbeam, my fingers moving in and out of the light. It looked like how piano sounded; soft, natural, meticulous.

“What do you think?”

“It’s really good,” I admitted.

“I thought you’d say that,” she said coolly.

There was that strange sensation again: the feeling of sitting on a seesaw with this young woman. Up, down, up.

I didn’t fire her that day, obviously. The next morning, I woke up certain again that she needed to leave, and again, she was armed with an idea by the time I arrived downstairs.

“Want to film some content by the chicken coop?”

We went out to the chicken coop. I muttered my usual Hello, ladies, and she said, “Why don’t you say that on camera?”

I looked at her. “Say what?”

“What you just said. Hello, ladies. ”

“You don’t think that’s a bit…kitsch?”

Shannon shrugged. “I think it would perform well.”

It did. It performed very well.

The next day, Shannon said we should try to incorporate the children into content more often. “Your baking tutorials are so good, but I think we could add a more organic, homey element if the children were actually involved, rather than floating around in the periphery.”

“It’s not going to work,” I said. “I’ve tried.”

I explained to Shannon how ungovernable the children were whenever I tried to film them, how quickly Clementine’s mood would shift from interested to bored to infuriated, how she had once thrown an entire bowl of flour across the kitchen, causing the ceramic to shatter.

“Let’s try it,” Shannon said. “Humor me. Just once.”

“All right,” I said. “Just once.”

And so we recorded a mother-daughter blueberry-pie-from-scratch tutorial, and I did my best to keep a smile pushpinned on my face while Clementine and Jessa cawed and cackled and screeched around me like a pair of crows.

“Do you see?” I said desperately over the sound of Jessa’s sudden wails. ( She wanted to crack the egg, but Clementine had already cracked it.) “This has been a disaster.”

“Actually, I think we’re getting great footage,” Shannon said. “Keep going.”

Again, she was right: the next morning, a twenty-second edit of peaceful motherhood arrived in my inbox. It was almost infuriating, how much better Shannon’s videos were than mine. I’d thought my photo and video content was well-done, but now I could see how amateur it really was. A conundrum, indeed: I wanted the world to see Yesteryear Ranch through my eyes, but everything looked better through Shannon’s gaze than my own.

At the end of the week, we pulled Clementine out of her homeschooling lesson after lunch so that we could use her in a picnic video on the hillside, a perfect mother-daughter moment right as the afternoon light went drippy and golden. At first, Shannon had hesitated at the thought of taking Clementine from class. “Doesn’t she need to…learn, or whatever?”

Three months from now, I would twitch at a comment like this. I would physically struggle to resist the urge to laugh and say lightly, Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black, little miss dropout?

But on that day I didn’t think twice. “It’s totally fine,” I said breezily. “Really, the children get so much one-on-one attention that all of them are testing years ahead. If Clementine ever went to public school, she’d be several grades beyond her peers.”

It would be wrong to say Clementine was a disobedient little girl. She was very obedient, she did her chores and helped her younger siblings and rarely complained, except for the one request she refused to ever accommodate for me: a smile. But with Shannon that afternoon, Clementine smiled nonstop. She even laughed at some of Shannon’s jokes. The footage from that day would become some of our most evergreen content, repurposed again and again: somehow, Shannon filmed us at an angle to make it look like Clementine was smiling and laughing with me.

After filming was done we sat on the hillside and ate cheese and crackers, watching the sun go down. At one point Clementine stood up to go collect wildflowers; she wanted to make a crown. While she plucked stems nearby, I turned to Shannon and said, “You thought we did all this alone, didn’t you?”

She turned to look at me. “Yeah, I did.”

I tried to give her a reasonable look. A you-couldn’t-understand-because-you’re-not-yet-a mother look. “No one can do all of this alone.”

“But,” she said, then stopped.

“Go ahead. You can say it.”

“ But, ” she said again, “you intentionally make it look like you do all this alone.”

I’d been waiting for this moment.

Lights, camera—

“I’ve never said that we don’t have help. Really, I don’t think that what I do on the ranch, which is to show the best parts of it, is any different than what anyone else does on social media. It’s a highlight reel, Shannon. I never said it wasn’t.”

Again, she was silent. My sensors flashed green. I continued. “There are millions of women out there who rely on me now, and I take that responsibility very seriously.”

“But you’re lying to them.”

“It’s not a lie. It’s just also not the full truth.”

“And why don’t you give them the full truth?”

“Because they don’t want it. And anyways, I give them other things they need even more.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“A temporary escape.”

The girls Shannon went to school with, the ones who loved me? They would never be able to do what I did. They would never be able to leave the maze. I knew it, and now Shannon did, too. But what I, what we, offered them, was the next-best thing: little moments of vicarious living. Brief bursts of imagining. This is what it would be like if you were as rich and beautiful and hardworking as me. This is what it will never be like for you. I knew that this was the true offering, deep in my bones, because it was my relationship to the account, too. Vicarious. Imagined. Unattainable.

Attain it, Online Natalie purred.

We were quiet for several minutes. Shannon didn’t say anything else, but it was obvious she was thinking about what I’d said, deciding if she agreed. Clementine came back with a handful of flowers and plopped down between us, shifting her butt until she was leaning against Shannon’s chest. “I’m going to make you a flower crown, Shannon.”

“That sounds fab,” Shannon said.

“Should we film it?” I said hopefully, but Shannon just shrugged. “We’ve got plenty of footage. This can just be for fun.”

“When are you going to have children, Shannon?” Clementine asked.

“Hm. I don’t know if I’ll have them, but if I do, it probably won’t be for a very long time.”

Clementine and I both frowned. “That’s really silly,” Clementine said. “All women become mothers when they grow up.”

“Actually, Clem, they don’t.”

When had Shannon started calling my daughter Clem? And what was this crap about childless women?

If she noticed my discomfort, she didn’t react to it. “There are just so many things that I want more, right now. Like travel. I’ve never seen the Pacific Ocean. I want to visit California and drive Highway One, maybe live in one of the towns along the coast.”

“Ocean,” Clementine said suddenly, looking at the two of us. “What’s that?”

The conversation stilled to silence.

“Clem,” I said lightly, trying on Shannon’s nickname, “I’m sure Nanny Louise has told you about oceans. They’re big bodies of water.”

“No,” Clementine corrected. “That’s a river.”

“But there’s more than one kind. You know what we’re talking about. Of course you do! Atlantic, Pacific, Indian…” I trailed off. I couldn’t remember the names of the other ones. There were other ones, weren’t there? Seven? Or was that the continents?

My eleven-year-old daughter gave me a look of blank distrust. Then she looked back up at Shannon. “What’s an ocean, Shannon?”

“Well,” Shannon began awkwardly, “I suppose it’s where all this land ends, and the water begins…”

As she went on, I found my gaze spinning upward to the sky, the madly blazing sun as it fell behind the mountains, and in the far distance, a pair of eagles circling lazily over something dead.

It was like that for a year. Up, down, up. On more mornings than I could count, I woke up and thought immediately, before anything else, I should fire her. And on just as many evenings, I lay in the darkness while my husband snored beside me and thought, Why hasn’t she quit?

The only conclusion I could come to was this: that despite all our differences and little tensions—in spite of the little white lies that ran through my farm like intersecting waterways—she genuinely liked me. Or wanted to like me.

And why didn’t I fire her?

Lord.

I wanted her to like me, too.

Our fifth child, Junebug, entered the world on a cool autumn day. It was my first homebirth. I felt unbelievably calm. I was on all fours in an inflatable pool, warm water sloshing around my knees while I swayed and groaned, the children watching me silently from across the room. I reached a hand out, and both the midwife and Caleb rushed toward me. “No,” I moaned lowly, slapping their hands away. “Not you. Shannon. I need Shannon.”

Caleb ran to get Shannon from the barn. She arrived looking terrified. “What? What is it? How can I help?”

Another contraction rolled through me. What did the Bible say on childbirth? Something about women needing to suffer. Something about earning your pain.

“Get the camera,” I said through gritted teeth. “Film it.”