“She said she saw a pesticide barrel in a corner of one of your photos.”
“She’s lying!” My face was so warm I was practically panting.
“Well. Honey.” My mother stared meaningfully behind me, and I turned around to see a pesticide barrel by the barn. A flare of anger whistled through me, so hot and painful I nearly gasped. Those dumb fucking immigrants. Idiot Mexicans. They never cleaned up after themselves, no matter how many times I asked.
Don’t tell Caleb,I nearly said to my mother. He thought our produce was organic. It was important to him that our produce was organic—more important, apparently, than turning a profit. After the third season of failed crops, I’d taken matters into my own hands. Told the workers to spray the fields at night. Told them to be very intentional with hiding the barrels.
Doug was right. What a border problem we had!
“It was really nice of Vanessa to mention, you know,” my mother went on. “She was worried about you. The fines for that kind of … confusion can send a business into the poorhouse.”
“What exactly do you want me to do, Mother?”
What she wanted was exactly what she wanted for my sister, too: to sweep the mess into a closet, shut the door, and lock it. “I just want you to be happy,” she said.
There it was again, that pointless word.
“Of course I’m happy,” I said angrily. “Don’t I look happy?”
An hour later, Caleb and the kids and I stood in the driveway waving goodbye, the one working brake light on that piece of shit van blinking rapidly at us as it halted its way down the hill. It felt like receiving a message in Morse code.Pull-your-life-to-geth-er.I swallowed the urge to pick up a rock and knock out the second brake light, silencing my mother’s last effort at communication.
“Well, that was fun,” Caleb said, right as Samuel started to wail and squirm in my arms. The poor child was hungry, probably, or tired, or constipated. Who knew. Certainly not me!
“Mama,” Clementine said. She tugged on my skirts. “Mama. Mama.”
Samuel wailed louder, a piercing shriek that struck my nervous system and reverberated through my body like a whacked funny bone.
“Mama. Mama. Mama.”
I looked down at Clementine. “What?”
She seemed surprised by my attention. She hesitated, then said quietly, “I want to live at Auntie Abigail’s house.”
I could’ve slapped her for that. Really, I could have.
“What’s for dinner, anyways?” Caleb said.
“I want to live with my cousins,” Clementine added. “I want to play tag.”
The world was so small in that moment, the sky so fully sapped of oxygen, that it felt like someone had wrapped my head in plastic wrap and was patiently waiting for me to suffocate to death.
“Mama.”
“Nattie?”
“Mama.Mama!”
What wouldReena do?
The thought snuck in before I could stop it.
How would someone like Reena respond to such breathtaking humiliation? She’d probably drink a coffee mug’s worth of vodka, draw a wobbly lipstick arc around the general area of her lips, and go galloping after a man who didn’t want her. Not exactly a useful example. But what about the other, smarter girls in our dorm hall, who rotated through boyfriends seasonally? The girls who Reena tried and failed to be?
The answer came down from on high: they would post a thirst trap.
thirst trap(noun, slang) : a social media post, especially a selfie or other photo, intended to elicit sexual attention, appreciation of one’s attractiveness, or other positive feedback. Example: A photo of a proud, thin, youthful-looking Christian woman standing with her growing litter in front of a five-million-dollar barn.Cheese!
“I want another baby,” I said to Caleb, over Samuel’s furious cries. “And I want to take a picture.”
