“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 wouldreallyhelp 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 asdeeplyunreliable, 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 aDUIover 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 toCalebMills, 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 myaltercationwith 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 arenotentirely 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 withher, 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 thebox—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 steadyclick, click, clickof 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?”
