Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 49

The next morning, I opened my eyes and said, “It was Shannon.”

Next to me, Caleb made a piggish snuffle. Rolled over onto his side, dead asleep. It was well before dawn. The room was pitch-black.

“It was Shannon who told Clementine what a tradwife is, because she needed Clementine’s help.”

Snore.

“She’s been gathering evidence, Caleb. All this time, that’s what she’s been doing. That’s why she stayed.”

“Three more minutes,” Caleb mumbled.

“She gave our daughter a fucking phone. ”

Nothing. Always nothing.

I lay in the darkness and fumed.

Overnight, the final puzzle piece clicked together. I was staring wildly into the black, my brain tick-tick-ticking away, when I remembered it: Shannon asking for a new phone. Saying hers broke.

Liar.

The phone didn’t fall into a puddle. Weren’t the latest phones water-resistant, anyways? No: Shannon got a new one so she could give her old one to Clementine. Want to know about oceans, Clemmie? Want to know why Mama spends so much time on her phone? Want to know what other kids call their mothers? It’s Mom. Want to call her Mom?

I thought back on every moment I had stood there like an idiot, smiling, while Shannon filmed the horrors unfolding around me. The workers in the fields: cla-chink. The pesticide barrels, hidden beneath a wool blanket behind the barn: cla-chink. The children screaming and crying: cla-chink. The Made in China stickers: cla-chink.

I’d been watching Shannon closely for months now. But my daughter? I hadn’t so much as glanced at her, and she had access to every room. She had been watching me closely, logging my every move, for twelve years. It wasn’t Shannon, but Clementine, who knew exactly how to capture me.

A few minutes after six, I knocked on Clementine’s door.

“Come in,” she called.

The lights were on when I stepped inside. Clementine was sitting on her bed, already dressed for the day, the covers already made up beneath her. There was a book in her lap, but she had set it down when I entered, and I couldn’t see the title.

She was thirteen years old. A little Natalie, Amelia liked to say. But now, for the first time, I found a strangely appraising expression in my daughter’s gaze, and I saw my father-in-law in her face, too.

“What is it?” she said, instead of Good morning. “What do you need?”

She had always spoken like an adult.

“I have to talk to you about something important.” I took a step inside, turned to shut the door behind me, then paused. A wave of nausea passed through me. I left the door slightly open. “Shannon told me she gave you something before she left.”

Clementine looked perfectly, authentically, adolescently bored. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. She gave you a phone. And you know that phones are against the rules.”

“Why would Shannon give me a phone?”

“Because,” I said, then stopped. “Well, how am I supposed to know why she does things?”

“So she told you that she gave me a phone, but she didn’t say why?” Clementine gave me a look. “How weird.”

A gust of panicked desperation blew through me. She knew. She knew what I was doing. If I wanted to find the phone, I would have to cause a scene, and there was nothing I resisted more than causing a scene, and Clementine. Knew. That.

“Clementine,” I said lightly. “Come on. Hand it over.”

“Hand what over?”

“The phone.”

“You’re starting to scare me, Mom.”

“Enough. I’m your mother. Give me the phone. ”

Clementine gave me a look of practiced confusion. “Do you know what I don’t get? You spend all day long staring at your phone. So why are you so freaked out at the idea of me having one?”

“You’re grounded,” I said, because I had no idea what else to say.

I expected her to whine, What for? But instead she leaned forward and said quickly, with a voice that snapped like a rubber band, “Does being grounded mean I don’t have to be in your stupid videos anymore? Or does it mean I have to be in them twice as much?”

At that moment, Caleb called my name from down the hallway.

“One minute,” I shouted.

“No. Right now!”

My bedroom was in full disarray when I walked back in. All the lights were on, and the bedding and pillows were all over the floor, and Caleb was standing at the foot of the bed, face as white as our sheets. As if he had woken to a tarantula in bed with him. No spider, though—just his phone, which he shoved quickly into my hands and stepped back. The tarantula was now shivering in my grip. I barely had time to read the preview for the first email— I hope this email finds you well—I’m reaching out from Pop Weekly Magazine for comment on the assault allegations that have recently —before another email dinged onto the notification screen— looking for comment —and then another— press inquiry!

“Natalie,” Caleb said, “you have to believe me. I didn’t hurt Shannon. I didn’t do anything to her, I swear —”

“Shut up,” I snarled. There was no time to explain to Caleb what had happened. While Mama was cleaning up your mess, darling, she made a little oopsie herself! I threw the phone at Caleb’s chest. It hit him and he let out a squeak of fear.

“Call your father,” I hissed, then stalked into the bathroom and slammed the door.

By the end of the week, we had a full legal team on retainer. Specifically, we had Doug’s legal team on retainer, which meant we were paying thousands of dollars an hour for five sleek-looking New Yorkers to hover in the kitchen in expensive-looking charcoal suits and alternate between staring at their phones and glancing nervously at me out of the corner of their eyes, like a pack of greyhounds waiting for the bell to go off.

When Doug arrived at the ranch, the lawyers looked relieved that their owner was here. They pawed and whined at him excitedly while he took his coat off, all five of them speaking over one another to tell him how prepared they were, how much work they’d been doing while he was away. I resisted the urge to chuck a handful of kibble at their faces.

That night, we sat around the dinner table, the lawyers and Doug and Caleb and me, and devised a plan of attack.

“She’s going to come out swinging,” the lead lawyer said. A bald man named Paul who tended to talk with his hands. “Sources are telling us it’s more likely to be televised than a magazine feature.”

“That means she presents well,” Doug said to Caleb and me. “They think she can win in the court of public opinion. Not all television interviews are created equal, though: she might just get a little two-minute scene in between war updates and the weather.”

Caleb gave his father a guilty, worried look. “Are you worried about the campaign?”

Paul was typing away on his laptop now. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

“No?”

“No. Doug’s base will rally around him. Middle America is deeply sympathetic to successful parents who have disappointing children. It fits perfectly with Doug’s message, really: kids are spoiled these days, no one knows how to work hard, the American dream is dead. That sort of thing.” Paul frowned at something on his laptop, then typed a little bit more, oblivious to or unconcerned with the sudden reddening of Caleb’s face. “In fact,” he went on, “it would really help us if it turned out that either of you has a drug problem.” He looked hopefully at Caleb, then at me. “Do either of you? Have a drug problem?”

“No,” Caleb muttered.

“No,” I echoed through gritted teeth.

“Ah.” Paul shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”

“It should be fine,” Doug added, “as long as we handle it correctly.”

“Okay, so have we learned anything relevant about Shannon?” I asked the lawyers.

“I think it would be a stretch to paint her as deeply unreliable, but medium-level unreliable, absolutely.” Paul began to tick off on his fingers. “Didn’t graduate from college. Has a sister who’s a lesbian. One of her parents got a DUI over the summer.”

“That’s what you have?” I looked fiercely at the lawyers. “I’m paying you two thousand dollars an hour, and the best you can come up with is that her sister is a lesbian?”

Two days after that meeting, Shannon’s prime-time interview was announced during a nighttime news segment for Doug’s favorite channel.

“Up next, an assault allegation from America’s favorite family farm,” a redheaded anchorman said. He glanced expectantly at his coanchor, a blond woman with eye shadow up to her eyebrows.

“That’s right, Sean. If you’re one of the millions of people who follow Yesteryear Ranch online, then you’ve probably come to know and love Natalie Heller Mills and her ever-growing family for the beautiful life they live out in the mountains of Idaho. If you don’t follow Yesteryear Ranch, you might know the last name anyways. Yes, that’s right: this is the same Mills family as presidential candidate and current front-runner Doug Mills. Natalie Heller Mills is married to Caleb Mills, the youngest son of the Mills family dynasty—which, between the big red barn and the family farm operation, makes their Instagram account about as American as it could possibly get.”

I sat on the couch, frozen, while a series of video montages grabbed from my account played. Me milking Sassafras. Me standing in the chicken coop with Jessa and Junebug grinning by my feet. Me and Caleb kissing in the fields, backlit by the falling sun.

“Heller Mills has millions of dedicated followers with whom she shares pictures and videos of her daily life. At the same time, a bit ironically, she’s also extremely private, and has famously never given an interview. Now a producer who lived at Yesteryear Ranch for just over two years has shocked the Yesteryear fan community with an accusation of assault—and the accusation has been leveled not at Natalie’s husband, Caleb, but against Natalie herself.”

The anchorwoman paused, giving room for the gasps in living rooms all over the nation. Next to me, Caleb was sitting on the couch. As far as I understood, Doug had told him the bare minimum details about my altercation with Shannon. Caleb hadn’t said anything to me about it yet.

“Next week, our culture correspondent will sit down with this producer to talk about her time at Yesteryear Ranch. The conversation will revolve around her story of assault, but I hear it’s also going to feature some incredible behind-the-scenes footage on how Yesteryear Ranch is actually run—and from what I hear, things are not entirely as they seem. That’s an interview you won’t want to miss.” The male anchor organized his papers and said in the chummy, about-to-transition-to-a-lighter-topic voice, “I didn’t know they had people working for them on that farm, did you, Sarah?”

“Sure didn’t!” she said cheerily back, and then the television screen went black.

Doug set down the clicker. “They gave her the full prime-time slot,” he said, a look of grudging admiration on his face. “That’s hard to get.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means that she’s going to be good.”

Natalie we totally believe u!!!

Holy shit lol u are totally fucked

Tradmommy and traddaddy behaving poorly? Color me shocked

THIWS ISA OBVIOUS MONEY GRAB THAT PRODUCER SHUD BE ASHAMED

The days leading up to Shannon’s interview were a blur of preparation. Doug and the lawyers were staying at a hotel in town; each morning, at nine on the dot, I watched their large black Escalade roll slowly up the hill, and I steeled myself for another day of tense planning. It felt like we were fortifying ourselves for a physical disaster: each time I walked into the kitchen, another twelve-pack of Gatorade had been stacked into the pantry, and the curtains in all the downstairs rooms were drawn shut, giving the house a boarded-up effect. I don’t know why Doug insisted we keep the curtains that way. Maybe he was afraid of photographers with the kind of zoom lenses that allowed them to see stars in outer space. Maybe he, too, was acting on some animal instinct to disappear. I understood the sentiment: whenever I had a free moment in the day, I walked into my bedroom and crawled under the covers until someone called my name.

Mama!

During those days, I found myself constantly stumbling upon new and unusual pairings of people congregating in new and unusual settings with each other. This, too, felt storm-like, the way a zoo flamingo might be found floating in a swimming pool after a hurricane. For example: Amelia sitting on Clementine’s bed with her, whispering quietly. Grandma never spends time in the children’s bedrooms with them. Or: two of the younger lawyers playing patty-cake on the floor with Jessa and Junebug. Is this time going to be billed? Perhaps most concerningly: Doug talking quietly with Caleb by the pantry one evening, the two of them facing the wall and speaking in sideways murmurs, the way one might do facing a painting at a museum.

I got only a few phrases from their whispered conversation— Need to take care of things…think outside the box —and then Doug clapped his hand on Caleb’s shoulder and said, “I believe in you, son.”

“I think everyone is turning on me, Mama.”

I was in the pantry in the dark again. My new home office, these days. It was late evening. The house was still. Through the phone, I could hear the steady click, click, click of my mother’s sewing needles as she knitted. I’d been relieved when she answered the phone, but not surprised. She rarely went to sleep before one in the morning. “What do you mean, turning on you?”

“I—it’s hard to explain. But some—some stuff has happened. Some stuff you need to prepare for.”

The jars tittered from the shelf across from me. What an understatement!

My mother was only half listening. There was commotion behind her. “It’s Natalie,” I heard her say. “I’m talking to Natalie.” Then she was back with me, saying, “Sorry, dear: Brandon was just looking for the peanut butter. These preteens with their hunger pangs! Now tell me again what’s going on?”

I stared at the wall. “People are lying to me, Mama. Family members. I can feel it. I can—I can see it.”

There was silence.

“Well,” my mother said softly. “I certainly didn’t want you to find out this way.”

I paused. “What?”

“I’m not surprised you sensed this, Nattie. I’m sure I’ve been acting…different.”

She hadn’t been, not at all—or if she had, I hadn’t noticed.

She went on. “I’ve been seeing a therapist, and she encouraged me to tell you girls…” She let out a fluttery, nervous breath. “Well. Listen. I only told Abigail first because she was in the house, we see each other so much!”

“Just tell me!” I said too loudly. My voice echoed in the pantry.

“It’s about your father.”

My heart rate quickened. I whispered, “What do you mean, my father?”

“Well, you know how he’s”—and here she lowered her voice to a whisper that matched mine—“ not dead .”

I stared tensely at nothing. “Yes, Mother. I know how he’s not dead.”

“The thing is, Natalie,” she said, and paused again. Breathed in sharply through the phone, then spoke through a rushing exhale: “He didn’t leave because he cheated. He left because I cheated.”

I didn’t understand. She wasn’t making sense. “What are you saying?”

“I was bored, all right? That’s the God’s honest truth: I was bored. I wish I had a better reason, but I don’t. One of the lawyers in the office—his name was Dan, you wouldn’t ever have met him, he transferred to the Boise office after all the…the mess—well, he knew how to salsa dance. Salsa! You should’ve seen the way his feet moved, and his hands…”

She was breathing heavily now, either from the effort of confession or the memory of Dan’s salsa hands. “I cheated on your father,” she said again, “and when he found out, he wanted to stay, to work it out, and I told him to leave. And once he was gone, I realized I liked it better. Being alone. And so I figured if I told you girls I was technically still married, then you wouldn’t ever pressure me to get remarried.”

I was speechless.

“I’ve held a lot of guilt over this,” she went on firmly, “and I’m terribly, terribly sorry for deceiving you girls. It wasn’t right. But”—and here she took another deep swell of breath, as if shoring herself up for what was next—“I also don’t regret it. Not at all. And I know how you’re probably feeling. But I spoke to Ben about it—”

“Ben, like Abigail’s boyfriend ? Why?”

“Well, honey. He’s a pastor. He has the ear of God. And do you know what he did when I told him?”

“No.” It was becoming quite clear to me that I would hate Pastor Ben if I met him.

“He took my hands firmly in his, and he said God loves me anyways. And he thanked me for raising Abigail to be such a strong, loving woman. And I thought—well, I thought that was very nice of him to say.” She paused to clear her throat. When she spoke again, her voice was lighter, more conversational. “They’re going to Sun Valley next weekend, just the two of them. A skiing weekend! How fun. Ben planned the whole thing. I think he’s just about the nicest man I’ve ever met. You should see Abigail when they’re together. She’s smitten.”

My eyes were unseeing in the darkness. As if my life could get any worse at this moment, it was now abundantly clear to me that a consortium of liars and scammers had conspired to brainwash my sister and mother. A woman therapist, a modern pastor. Snake oil salesmen, both of them: encouraging divorce, sanewashing infidelity.

“These people are taking advantage of you, Mother,” I said quietly. “They’re mining your weaknesses. It’s so obvious. You’ve always been too nice.”

There was a long silence here.

I expected my mother to hem and haw, to say, Oh, Nattie, it’s nothing like that. But then she did something altogether different. She said slowly, and with obvious discomfort, “Do you know what, Natalie? I—I don’t think I am too nice. In fact, I’m very proud of how nice I am. I think it’s a good thing. And if I’m being honest, I’m very disappointed with how not nice you are.”

“Mother! You have no idea how hard things are right now, and if you would just listen to me —”

And here is where the strangest moment of my entire life happened: my mother, that good Christian woman, snapped.

“No!” she shouted, so loudly that I held the phone away from my ear. “You listen to me, young lady. This is your problem! This has always been your problem! You think kindness is some silly frivolous side virtue, when it is in fact the whole damn thing!”

I’d never heard her say a curse word in my life. “Mother,” I sputtered again, “I just—”

She roared in return, her anger vibrating through the phone like some energetic hex: “ WHY IS IT SO HARD FOR YOU TO BE KIND? ”