“Oh, they’re the best. I don’t know what I would do without them. They’re like my little angels.” I watched her as she watched her children. She’d aged. We hadn’t seen each other almost at all when I was living with Caleb’s parents. When I moved back to Idaho, I had noticed something different about her, something strange in her gaze, but I hadn’t taken a moment to really consider it until now. I’d seen my sister in all manner of moods, happy and sad and tired and overwhelmed, but this, what I was seeing on her face now, was something else entirely. Something altogether new.
Then she looked at me, and her expression shifted. “And how have you been?” she asked. “Better?”
“Oh, yes. I’m perfect.” Then I called to my mother, “Would you like to hold the baby?”
While Abigail’s kids chased each other through the rooms, I gave my mother and sister a tour of the house, pointing out everything that was going to get replaced in the renovation: the light fixtures, the granite countertops, the marble-tiled bathroom floors. We’d been meeting with architects, I told them. Only a week ago, we’d found the one we wanted to work with.
(Do you still want indoor toilets, ma’am, or would you prefer an outhouse?)
“We’re just waiting for him to fit us into our schedule,” I said, “and then all this is going to gobye-bye.”
“But it’s all brand-new,” my mother said. Samuel was fast asleep in her arms.
“It’s just not our taste,” I said. “I mean, really.” I gestured to the living room. “I mean, it looks like a Pottery Barn outlet got sick and threw up in here.”
My sister stared at a nearby wall sconce, as if trying to understand what a light fixture could’ve done to warrant such violent execution. “Well, don’t throw out all these perfectly good appliances. At least donate them.” Abigail paused delicately. “I could probably take some stuff. If it would help you, I mean.”
It was obvious Christian-speak forI’dlike your leftovers, please.I played along, feigning interest at the idea of donation. “It would besohelpful if you did that for us.”
Still, my mother looked fretful. “Do you really want to get rid of all these perfectly good appliances? It’ll cost you a fortune to replace!”
I gave her an apologetic wince. “Money is not a concern.”
Except it was. Oh, it was! A little secret I told no one, that I barely acknowledged even in the quiet of my own thoughts: the money was nearly gone. We hadn’t pulled the trigger on the renovation because I wasn’t yet clear on how we would be able to afford it. We were just about to hit the three-year anniversary of the farm.We’d eradicated the black mold and restored the structural integrity of the barn and bought brand-new top-of-the-line tractors, we had tilled fields and daily workers and a cow and some chickens, we paid the financial equivalent of theGDPof a small nation in taxes each year, and also, we had yet to turn a profit as small as a penny. Just a few days earlier, Caleb had joked happily that our zucchini and egg earnings from the most recent farmers market pop-up hadalmostcovered a full tank of gas for the truck. To which I replied in happy-wife-singsong, “You can’t put a price on learning!”
What I wanted to say:Want to blow through five million dollars so quickly it makes your head spin? Buy a fucking farm.
After the house tour, I took my sister and my mother out to the fields. We stood at the top of the hill and watched my husband, several hundred feet away, chasing the kids in a turbocharged game of tag while our latest batch of men from Home Depot worked the fields, two of them driving tractors that dragged great silver rakes across the dirt, three of them walking around and pulling big rocks out of the soil.
My mother stared out at the scene with a look of abject dismay, her poker face momentarily abandoned. “What are you growing?”
“Beets, I think,” I said. “And asparagus? I can’t remember. Something to complement the zucchinis. This is Caleb’s world. I try to keep out of it and let him run the show.”
“Ah!” My mother laughed feebly, ever a good sport. “Divide and conquer. Always a good approach.”
“I don’t remember you ever wanting to live on a farm,” Abigail said. She waved at a horsefly.
“It was my idea, actually, to move here,” I said. “I was the one who brought it up to Caleb on our first date, the idea of living on a farm.”
“Did you.”
“I did.”
“Why? You hate animals. And dirt.”
I looked at Abigail. There it was again: that strange expression on her face.
“Well,” my mother said smoothly, before I could reply. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a prettier farm in my life.”
“Pretty as a picture,” Abigail said. Then, blasphemy: she pulled a pack of cigarettes from her bag. My mother and I both gasped.
“Abigail!” I said.
“Abigail,” my mother echoed fiercely. “Thechildren.”
“The children, the children!” Abigail said in soprano imitation, a cigarette now held delicately between her teeth. She rolled her eyes and said through a gritted jaw, “They’re specks in the distance, Mother.” She was rattling around in her bag for a lighter now, oblivious to or uninterested in our gaping expressions. “God,” she muttered as she held the flame to her lips. She took a deep drag, exhaled with evident relief, then said again, “God,let someone care about me as much as they care about the children.” She stepped back, waved her cigarette in a big circle, highlighting the scene before us: the fields, the workers, the children, my husband. “You’re right, though, Mother: itispretty.” She cocked her head, narrowed her eyes pensively, took another drag. Glanced back at me. “But do you ever get sick of the smell, Nattie? Do you ever get tired of breathing in so much shit?”
I stared at her in shock. “What iswrongwith you today?”
