“Abigail,” my mother said, “why don’t you go back to the house and take a nap?”
Abigail didn’t respond, just took another long drag, frowning at something in the distance. Smoke billowed around her words. “I’m not tired.”
“Well,” I snapped, “you look exhausted to me.”
She turned sharply to me. “You know what? Iamtired. Mother, can you corral the children to nap when you come back inside?” Before my mother could stutter out a response, she dropped the cigarette and pressed a cowboy boot heel into the grass, then turned and walked quickly back to the house.
As soon as she was out of earshot, I hissed to my mother, “What in the Lord’s name has gotten into her?”
My mother gave me a skittish look. “Let’s just be charitable, shallwe? The poor thing has had a hard time at home recently. She hasn’t been sleeping well. She isn’t herself!”
I rolled my eyes, then dropped to a crouch and rooted around in the high grass for Abigail’s cigarette butt.
That night we took the kids to a rodeo an hour away, farther into the mountains. It was a cool night, the kind of evening that felt like a postcard vision of the Wild West, all the reds and whites and blues dipped in shades of diesel-grade Americana: cerulean sky, fire-truck clay dirt, divinely bright rodeo lights. The ice cream truck sold popsicles colored like flags. The rodeo clowns wore tasseled vests made of blue-and-white star fabric. We sat in the stands and watched teenage boys face down bulls the size of Abigail’s minivan, their expressions streaked with morbid determination. When they ran and dipped and jabbed, they bared their teeth like little animals, their metal braces catching the stadium lights. Teenage girls sauntered through the bleachers in leggings, holding out Tupperware containers for donations to the troops overseas. Caleb bounced baby Samuel on his lap, pointing at the bull riders, whispering to our drooling, incoherent son, “Someday that’ll be you, pal.” My sister kept glancing around at the men in the crowd, her gaze lingering on the bald spots, the muddy boots, the quiet belches, until finally she realized I was watching her and turned to face pointedly forward.
The crowd roared in unison at the first sight of blood. Caleb bought all the children fried dough. My mother cried at the beginning when a six-year-old sang the national anthem. Clementine cried at the end when she saw what happened to the bulls.
We got dinner on the way home at a famous country-fried steak house on the side of the highway. The waitress handed out plates loaded with sickly-sweet dinner rolls and steak gone spongy with gravy. Abigail pushed butter-soaked veggies around on her plate, completely impervious to my glare. Across the table, Caleb was talking my mother’s ear off about the forums. No, notonechat room, he explained patiently, but multiple: he used his fingers to tick them off as he went. He had his farming buddies, his homeschooling buddies, his intellectual buddies, and so forth.The manosphere,he called it, a phrase he’d mentioned in my presence before, which always sounded to me like an amusement park for grown men.Welcome to Manosphere: Where the Men Go!
“Man-o-sphere,” my mother repeated, in the same way Doug had done months earlier, when he and Amelia had visited. Like they were both learning to speak Italian. Amelia hadn’t said anything at all; they were only stopping by for the night on their way to drop her off at a rehab clinic in Wyoming, and she had accordingly spent the whole dinner looking mournfully at her glass of Sauvignon Blanc, like she was spending a last evening with a lover before the war was on.
“Manosphere,” Doug had said a second time, frowning slightly at the thought. Then he tapped Caleb’s phone and said, “Show me.”
My mother, on the other hand, merely sat back in her chair in contemplation.
When we got home, Caleb told us to relax in the living room. “You ladies spend time together,” Caleb said, taking the baby from my arms. “I’ll give the kids a bath.”
I frowned. “All of them? At once?”
It seemed a bit unnatural—Abigail’s oldest, Brady, was now seven, and seemed to play a bit rough—but Caleb waved my concern away and began corralling them down the hall.
“Not the baby, though!” I called after him. “Don’t put the baby in the bath!”
“Duh,” he called back.
Meanwhile, Abigail was already pulling a bottle of urine-yellow Chardonnay out of her bag. “What about a glass of wine? Mama? Natalie?”
“But you’re pregnant,” I said.
“A thimble won’t hurt me,” she said, then filled a goblet-size glass to the brim.
I didn’t say anything, just exchanged a glance with my mother while Abigail handed us our glasses and guided us over to the couch.I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen my mother have a glass of wine on an evening that had not been sanctioned as celebratory by the church. Now she took one without comment.
“So,” Abigail said finally, once we were seated. “There’s something I want to tell you all.”
I sat down on the couch expectantly. The way my sister was sitting, with her hand resting on her pregnant stomach, I couldn’t help but think:She looks so old.Only two years older than me, not yet thirty, but she could’ve been forty-five. Her forehead held three deep etchings that gave her a look of constant, parenthetical despair, and too many of her body parts had begun to swing at the smallest movement. Her arms, her breasts, her jowls. Not fat—not yet at least—but deflated. That’s what children and poverty do: suck the collagen right out of you.
“I’m leaving Bryce,” Abigail said.
My mother sat back and clapped her hand to her chest as if she’d been shot. I, on the other hand, let out a little laugh, because I honestly thought my sister was making a bad joke to lighten the mood from such a tense day. When her severe expression didn’t break, though, I said, “You can’t be serious.”
“Lord,” my mother moaned. “Lord, help me.”
“I called a divorce lawyer,” Abigail said. “I signed a retainer.”
I shook my head. “But how can you afford a lawyer?”
Abigail frowned. “That’s your first question?”
