I stood with Clementine in the hallway between the dressing room and the stage, watching the brothers hand outNDAs to the paramedics before they could step inside.
As they took Amelia away on a stretcher, her gaze drifted foggily toward me and Clementine. She muttered something at us, but it couldn’t be heard beneath her oxygen mask. “Say bye-bye to Grammy,” I instructed, and Clementine waved bye-bye, right as Doug’s voice boomed through the auditorium hallways. “At this very moment, my youngest son is working day and night to revitalize a working meat and dairy farm in southwest Idaho.” (Vegetables,I thought.Not meat.Caleb would be so disappointed.) “He could’ve been anything, my son, but he chose to get his hands dirty like a real American—and you know what? I couldn’t be prouder of him!”
“Do you hear that?” I told Clementine, over the waves of polite applause. “Grandpa’s trying to be electable. Can you sayelectable?”
“Electable,” she repeated, in a tone I could only describe as bored, and we both fell silent.
Picture 5
The photo: Caleb and I in the fields at sunset, kissing, him dipping me low.
The caption:I always wanted my very own cowboy.
“Let’s have sex,” I said one night.
Caleb gave my vagina a long, skeptical look. “Is it safe?”
“Of course it is. This is what we’re designed to do.”
“But what about—”
“For the last time: That wasn’t a miscarriage! It was just a heavy period!”
This is what my mother had encouraged me to tell Caleb a month earlier, after he walked into the bathroom to find me sobbing wildly, my hands and thighs covered in blood. We’d been trying to have another baby for more than two years now. The panic I felt about this situation was indescribable.
I tried my best to give a sexy look, but Caleb seemed put off by the expression on my face, so I dropped the put-on and said, like always: “You promised.”
I massaged Caleb’s penis for ten minutes, squeezing and twisting slowly at the base of the shaft with one hand and milking the tip with the other. Usually, this worked to get him erect enough for us to have sex. Tonight, though, nothing came of my efforts. Each time I glanced back up at Caleb’s face, his eyes were closed and scrunched up, his mouth in a sort of grimace, so that I couldn’t tell if he was trying hard himself to get into the mood, or waiting for me to give up.
Finally I sat back, letting his penis flop away like a slinky. “What is it?”
“It’s nothing. I’m just exhausted.” He did look exhausted. Hewasworking hard. Up at sunrise, outside all day long, then at the computer for hours each night. But wasn’t this, too, an essential part of being a husband? A relentless, almost mechanical drive to repeatedly impregnate your wife?
“But I’m ovulating. If we don’t have sex now, we’ll have to wait another month.”
“Shouldn’t we just leave this up to the Lord?”
He’d said this once before, several months earlier, after someone on one of his forums suggested it was blasphemy for women to track their menstruation in such a fashion.These things should be left up to the Lord, full stop.Now I cut him off before he could start on that tangent again. “The Lord wants us to try, Caleb. He wants us to care.”
He didn’t respond. His eyes were closed now. A second later, he was making soft little sleep snuffles. Even his penis seemed to be dead asleep and snoring against the bed of his thigh. Infuriating. I thought of what he said to me on the day of our wedding—I can’t wait to tasteyou—and then I thought of the horrible graphics I’d seen on his computer screen—Intense kissing leads to squirtingorgasm!!!!—and I swallowed the urge to crack a lampshade over his head.
Instead, I got out of bed and went to the kitchen, then came back into the bedroom with a cereal bowl and dropped it onto Caleb’s stomach, startling him awake.
“Wha? What’s this?”
“I don’t care how you get it done. Just get it done.”
“But—”
“You promised.”
Caleb was silent for a long time. Then he got out of bed.
Five minutes later, he came out of the bathroom and handed me the bowl.
“Thank you,” I said. “Now go to sleep.”
In the kitchen, I set the bowl on the counter then pulled a sauce baster out of the drawer.
