Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 9

The night I met Caleb Mills, he was sitting in a folding chair for our church group. He held a flimsy paper plate steady with one hand and was picking at a mound of soft cheese with the other. He glanced up at me. He was cute. The kind of guy who looked like a farmer’s son even while he was sitting in a church basement in Cambridge, wearing a button-down shirt and khaki pants. We made eye contact, then I sat down and we didn’t look at each other again.

The next meeting, he asked for my name.

The meeting after that, he asked where I was from.

The fourth meeting: Did I want to get coffee sometime?

That’s how slowly our relationship moved at the beginning. Dating in my religion works that way: it feels like you’re rolling very slowly down a very long runway—then right as you think you’re going to die for lack of momentum, you find yourself lifting up, up, up, spinning wildly toward the sun in a sudden aerial ascent.

On our first date, Caleb bought me a scone. He told me about his family, his fancy political father and his soon-to-be-fancy-political brothers, all of them senators-in-waiting, like a little line of princes. Jack, John, George, Henry, Caleb. Such a perfectly American list that I would later wonder if their father had allowed one of his political consultants to advise on names with highest rates of electability. His mother had always wanted a daughter, Caleb told me, but instead she got five boys. He smiled ruefully at that, and I thought: I would take five of those.

In exchange, I told him about my dead father, my three-legged family. He learned about Abigail and her fiancé. He winced when I said Bryce, and that inspired a rare gift from me: a genuine laugh. Then I told him about the mountain range that circled my town, how rarefied the air felt at such high elevation. You can’t help but feel like you’re living closer to heaven.

“So you don’t want to stay on the East Coast after graduation, then.” Caleb was from the dust bowls of California. Like me, he thought the lifestyle inherent to living in a city was unnatural. A world meant for gerbils, not people. “Where do you want to go, then?”

I paused. Where did I want to go?

“I want a farm. With chickens. I want to live near my mother. I want a view of the mountains from my bedroom window, and I’d like to study theology. Part-time, of course, and only after the children are grown.”

This was pretty much exactly what every good Christian girl back home claimed to want, except for the theology bit. I’d added that part for myself.

Caleb didn’t say anything. Just cocked his head and gave me a strangely wistful smile, like he was already feeling nostalgic for the moment we currently found ourselves in.

“How about you?” I said, suddenly anxious. “What do you want?”

He looked shyly into his cappuccino cup. “I don’t know.” He shrugged, stared thoughtfully past me. “What you said sounds nice.”

On our second date, Caleb took me to dinner at an Italian restaurant in the North End, and I realized he was capital- R rich. Over eighty- dollar plates of truffle pasta and cold glasses of lemon water, he said, “I’ve been thinking about that farm nonstop since we met.” It was an innocuous statement, yet his face was suddenly bright red.

I reached for my water. I couldn’t decide if I loved the taste of truffle or hated it. “What farm?”

“The one you want. With the chickens. And the mountains?”

“Oh,” I said, fingers paused around the cool glass. “Of course. What about it?”

Now that I’d learned more about Caleb, the idea of a farm seemed like amateur hour for dreaming big. And anyways, the girls back home talked about farms only because it was distasteful for them to say what they really wanted: to be like Caleb. Wealthy.

“I can’t stop thinking about it,” he said. “You could teach me everything you know, and I—well. I’m a quick learner.”

He was blushing so furiously that I might have worried he was having an allergic reaction, if I wasn’t so preoccupied with the present issue at hand.

Teach. What did Caleb mean by teach? I never said I knew how to farm, yet here we were, talking about living in the middle of nowhere, teaching each other how to—what? Rake dirt? Milk a cow? Cut a chicken’s head off? The way Caleb was staring at me with that intense, pained look in his face—he clearly needed an answer, but an answer to what?

Relax, I told myself. This is just a moment. It doesn’t really matter.

Here is what did matter: he was young and handsome and wealthy. Most important of all: he liked me. Really liked me. He said I was fascinating and funny and beautiful. No one had ever thought I was any of those things. I’d spent my whole life alone, floating like a specter at the far edges of elementary school friendships, then glaring at the huddled cliques I walked past in middle school, then openly denouncing them in high school. And here, suddenly, was a fundamentally likable person, somehow liking me.

Is it a choice, if there’s only one option?

Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.

I leaned across the table and pressed my hand over His.

Sorry, I mean his. Caleb’s. And at my touch, he let out a great gasp of air, and I realized he’d been holding his breath. Waiting for me to decide.

On the third date, we discussed marriage.

On the fourth date, Caleb stood stock-still as I leaned forward and pressed my lips, just barely, to his. I felt his heartbeat vibrating through my mouth. The kiss was dry. It lasted for a second. As I pulled away, I found myself imagining his tongue, the size of it. A shiver ran through me.

Caleb touched my arm. “You have goose bumps.” He looked awestruck that he was capable of having that effect on me.

I didn’t know what to say. I felt the heat rising off my face like steam. I’d never understood what it felt like to want. I stepped forward and pressed my face into Caleb’s chest, suddenly desperate to feel compression against my skin. He wrapped his arms around me and we stood there like that for a while, both of us breathing hard. Then I felt something long and firm pressed against my thigh, and I stepped quickly back.

The weekend of our engagement, Caleb’s parents flew into the city to celebrate and paid for my mother to fly in, too. Caleb’s father rented out the back room of a four-star steak house in Back Bay. I wore a white dress made of a crepe linen fabric. Caleb’s mother had bought it for me and shipped it to my dorm room. She had also encouraged me over the phone to invite friends to the party, and I had tactfully declined, citing my interest in making this a family affair.

“You look like Jackie Kennedy,” my mother whispered when she saw me at the restaurant. She was wearing a simple navy shift dress, a pattern she’d sewn herself, and was gazing at the fabric of my dress with an expression of nervous awe. “Let me see that ring.”

I held out my hand, so proud that it felt like my head was going to lift off my neck and bob around by the ceiling. “It’s an antique,” I said as my mother turned my finger this way, then that way, letting the diamond catch the light. She looked as thunderstruck by the display as I felt by it. “It’s just over four carats.”

“Natalie,” my mother breathed. “It’s huge.”

“I know,” I said, matching her tone. “I told Caleb it was way too big.”

She gave me a look of approval. That was the way women operated in my community: if you wanted to be a wealthy Christian woman and maintain good standing, you needed to publicly disavow your luxuries in order to maintain possession of them. It was a strange tug-and-pull I’d borne witness to my entire life. The only surprise was that it was finally happening to me. I was becoming the kind of woman other women were jealous of. Each time I looked at the ring, I felt an intoxicating combination of embarrassment and glee. It was a rich, decadent piece of jewelry. If I looked at it for too long, I started to feel sick. It was too much, it was a shameful display of wealth, I should give it back and demand we find something smaller, and also: I’d launch a holy war before I parted with it.

As for Caleb, he insisted it was a perfect diamond for a woman like me. I was a flawless woman, he said. A timeless piece of decoration.

The engagement party was filled with Caleb’s family’s friends, as well as some major donors to Doug’s current senatorial campaign. (What I would learn quickly: Doug was always building toward, in the middle of, or conducting a postmortem on a campaign.) For most of the evening, I sat in a booth with my mother while Caleb and his older brothers and his father, Doug, schmoozed through the crowd, bray-laughing and backslapping. I’d already lost track of which brother was which, they looked so much alike. The tech one, I thought firmly, staring at David—or was it Henry? No, John was the finance one, yes, Henry was the tech one, and George and Jack were the political advisers—

Amelia floated quietly behind the men, smiling brightly in their shadow, occasionally tugging at her pink Chanel skirt and blazer set like some Special-Edition Presidential Barbie. When I first met her earlier that night, she told me in a soft, fluttery falsetto to call her Mama. I had thought her teeth were so white they almost looked purple. Then I saw how much wine she drank, and I realized they were actually just purple.

I watched my mother watch Amelia across the room. I knew we were thinking the same thing. Then my mother turned and looked at me. A silent conversation unfolded.

This is what you want, then?

She seemed genuinely surprised. She didn’t know Caleb or his family yet, but she’d seen enough to understand what was happening here. When she had talked about my future, it had always been Natalie the professor, Natalie the academic. Of course, the assumption of children and homemaking was always there, too, hovering in the white space between all those hypothetical careers. My mother, a breadwinner herself, was lopsidedly progressive in that way: she didn’t believe in divorce, but she did genuinely believe her smartest daughter would have it all: a good job and a good family, in Jesus’s name, amen.

If you marry this man, she said to me now with her blinking eyes, you will become his smiling shadow.

A year ago, I wouldn’t have wanted that. But the last six months had changed me. I blinked back an answer. I thought I wanted the world, Mama. But I’ve seen the world now, and I want no part in it.

At the other end of the room, Caleb’s father clinked his glass. “Can the happy couple make their way to the stage?”

The crowd parted like the Red Sea before me. I didn’t hesitate.