Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 45

The night Caleb told me what happened with Shannon, I was six months pregnant with our sixth child, and I didn’t sleep a wink. I lay there in the darkness, staring at the ceiling while my husband snored peacefully next to me. The sound made smoke pour out of my ears. But of course he slept peacefully. As soon as Caleb told me what was going on, what was happening under my nose, he had effectively handed the problem over to me. That was, after all, how all good marriages worked. My husband moved instinctually through the world, he did the things he wanted to do and didn’t do the things he didn’t want to do, and I— happy wife, happy life —trailed beatifically in front of and behind him, sweeping the ground clean for him to walk forward, and then just as quickly sweeping his messy footprints away.

That’s what they’d told me to do, right? All those women who came before me? Be a mother, be a wife, and keep the household clean.

Liars. Every Christian woman I ever met had been a big fat lying bastard. Lord have mercy on their big fat lying bastard souls.

At five, Caleb got up and left to milk the cows. At six, I got out of bed and went to the kitchen, ignoring the children and the nannies at the table. I made an espresso and walked out to the front porch and sat on a rocking chair while the dark sky slowly lightened. The espresso went cold while I sat there, rocking away, a wool blanket draped around my shoulders. Wondered where my family might have ended up, if not here on this ranch. Those options weren’t satisfying, though, not even for a daydream, and so I moved farther back and wondered where I might have ended up, if not with Caleb. A series of silent films played out in front of me. I watched them with vague disappointment. If I didn’t marry Caleb, I would’ve married someone else.

Caleb was in love with Shannon. That’s what he had told me the night before. He was in love, truly in love, for the first time in his life. At that moment in his little monologue, I did flinch, I’ll admit that. Not like he noticed. He was too busy landing the final blow. “I’m moving to New York,” he said in the darkness, practically breathless with excitement. “I’m starting a new life. She really challenges me, you know? She pushes me on my ideas. Our conversations are incredible. Did you know, Natalie, that the rat thing isn’t true?”

“Yes,” I said softly. “I know that the rat thing isn’t true.”

He paused. “Why didn’t you say anything, then?”

I didn’t answer.

“I’m sorry,” Caleb said. “I know this will be hard. But it’s for the best, Natalie. I really believe that. You and me—we were never meant to be together. You know that, right? I think you’ve always known that.”

Moving to New York. Starting a new life. With Shannon.

I didn’t believe it. No way. Not a chance. Caleb wouldn’t get more than three miles away from this ranch before a girl like Shannon got sick of him. My husband was like a farm animal, or a very expensive suede couch. Constant work. Diminishing returns. It required relentless sacrifice and impeccable discipline to give your life over to the care and management of a man like that. Shannon was not that kind of woman.

I said, “Is she pregnant?”

Caleb was silent. It was too dark to see his expression, but I could imagine it perfectly, his brow furrowed in contemplation. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “But if she is, I’d like to keep it.”

My husband, everyone! What a prince.

At seven on the dot, I knocked on Shannon’s bedroom door and heard a muffled Come in. I opened the door to find Shannon standing by her closet in a T-shirt and underwear, hanging a dress in the shared closet. “Oh,” she said. “Sorry, I thought you were one of the nannies.”

I waited, my eyes averted, while she rooted around the clothes in her hamper, found a pair of jeans, and quickly put them on. “What’s up? Is everything okay?”

I stepped inside and shut the door behind me. I smiled softly. “I’m sure you can imagine why I came up here.”

There it was: a whole world spinning in her expression. A long moment passed, and then she sat down on her bed. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess I can.”

“He said you’re moving to New York together.”

“ Christ, ” Shannon muttered. “That is—yikes.”

“My husband is,” I said, and paused. Took a moment to collect myself. Smooth the wrinkles of my fury into place. “He can be gullible. So if there was, at any point—” I paused again. I needed to be careful. Maybe she was recording the conversation. Not likely, but not impossible. “I’m aware that it’s inappropriate. He’s your employer, and so if there was any pressure on your part, or if he promised you any money—”

“He didn’t pressure me.” Her pants were still unbuttoned, a pink bud on the lace of her underwear staring out at me like an evil eye. “Look. It’s…” She exhaled slowly. Tried again. “Okay. Here’s the thing. I was angry after that day at the rally. I just felt so—helpless. And so I kind of made this bet with myself to see if I could make some tiny difference in my own life. Something practical. Something small. And I realized I could try to debunk some of the insanely stupid shit Caleb believes.” Pause. “And then, I don’t know. Things—” Longer pause. “They developed.”

“Developed,” I echoed. “Is that how you would describe it?”

She looked at me. “He said you wouldn’t care.”

I felt sick. I hoped it didn’t show. “And you believed him.”

“Yes,” she said simply. Just: yes.

There was a distortion to the scene that wasn’t making sense to me, a great black spot in the center of the lens. From some objective standpoint, it was obvious that I was driving this conversation, but it didn’t feel that way, not at all. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just can’t believe this is happening right now. I can’t believe I’m talking to a woman who admitted to seducing my husband, and who refuses to show a drop of remorse for it.”

“Seduced.” Shannon looked genuinely surprised. “You think I seduced him?”

“You think you didn’t?”

Shannon brought a hand to her face. She seemed to be having a lot of trouble composing herself. When she spoke, her voice was shaking. “You know, Natalie, I watch the way you treat Caleb. You act like he’s dumb. Like he’s a little kid who needs to be protected or something.” She looked at me. “He’s not as dumb as you think. In fact, I think he’s pretty smart. Look at this.” She made an impatient gesture around the room, but I knew she was referencing the range in its entirety, the barn and the chickens and the cows and the rivers and the mountains and the fences. “He figured out a way for you to create a wet dream for him to live inside, and he found a way for you to do it so that you thought it was your idea. And now he just gets to… exist, in this psychotic little snow globe you built just for him. And in spite of all that, you somehow go on thinking that this was your idea. That you’re the one who’s in control.”

“This was my idea.”

“Do you know why Caleb likes me so much? It’s because I’m the only person on this farm who treats him like a person, not a project. I listen when he speaks. I ask questions. I call him on his bullshit. I talk to him like I’m a real person. Like he is a real person—and if he takes that experience and assumes it to mean we’re in love, then all that proves to me is how bad his understanding of relationships really is.”

I felt a firm awareness that I was standing in the most wondrous moment of my own life. “You don’t feel bad at all. You’re a whore. A homewrecker. And you don’t even care.”

Shannon raised her eyebrows. It was the only part of her expression that moved. “Actually,” she said quietly, “I’m not. This is what I’m trying to say to you, Natalie. In order for me to be a homewrecker, you would have to have a home for me to wreck, and you don’t. You don’t even have a family. What you have is a business. Your nannies know it. Your farmhands know it. Your husband knows it. And someday your kids will know it, too. And do you know what? I think they’re going to hate you for it. I think they’ll never forgive you.”

Lord, God, help me.

“Bitch,” I whispered, almost worshipfully. I felt wild. I didn’t know what to do, how to act, what to say. Online, offline. Neither version of myself was prepared for this moment. My head felt dizzy, out of control, like a spinning top. I heard myself say, like some terrible impersonation of a woman I didn’t know, “Was it fun, Shannon? Was it fun getting fucked by a man who can’t even maintain an erection?”

She was supposed to look horrified, or maybe ashamed. Instead, she looked concerned. “Oh God, Natalie—is he not hard when he has sex with you?”

Whoosh.

What’s a lady to do when the floor falls out from under her?

Easy answer: She closes her eyes. Imagines a floor where there isn’t one. Pretends that the twitch in her eye is from lack of sleep.

Worry. Women worry.

Up all night worrying, I suppose!

Good Christian women were great at worrying. They were not, however, good at confrontation. But good Christian men? Born for it.

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.