I sighed. “What happened this time?”
We were on our fifth and sixth dairy cow. Caleb had recently become convinced they would live longer in pairs.
“It’s not that,” he huffed. “It’s—andwe—andyou—”
“Lord, Caleb. Take a breath. You’ll terrify the children.”
“Justcome to the barn.”
I told Clementine, “Watch your siblings until I come back.”
“No, Mama,” she said immediately. “I want to come.”
“Next time,” I assured her as I slipped my shoes on.
Caleb walked quickly down the sloping hill, saying occasionally over his shoulder, “Hurry!”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” I snapped as I waddle-huffed after him. Our little girl, Jessa, was due any day now.
I hadn’t been to the barn in over a week, and I was happy to see the inside looked clean. At the far end of the stalls, an older Mexicanman was sweeping the floors. Another one was brushing a massive brown and white horse. As Caleb marched quickly down the hallway toward his office, which was in a former supply room, I said, “Caleb, whose horse is that?”
“Ours,” he said. “I got him the other day.”
“You got a horse?”
“No time!Hurry!”
I turned into Caleb’s office and stopped short. “Oh, Caleb—you didn’t.” The room was the size of a supply closet—it probablyhadbeen a supply closet—but it was now literally covered in the kind of technology I associated with teenage boys. Three big computer monitors were crowded onto a small desk shoved into the corner; Caleb was now sitting in front of the desk, hurriedly clearing off the other chair to make space for me.
“Quick,” he said, “sit, before the segment is over.”
I sat down, still taking in my surroundings with a queasy pit in my stomach. An image popped into my head: Caleb, inviting one of the workers to his office for a “business conversation,” trying to look stern amid all his fancy gadgets.
“This guy has been talking about your account for like ten minutes now,” Caleb said. I followed Caleb’s gaze to the middle computer monitor, where a livestream was taking place. On one half of the screen, a heavyset man with a large beard was sitting in front of an industrial-size microphone. On the other half of the screen was—me. Smiling. Superimposed on his screen.
Caleb pressed the space bar and the volume blared through the speakers.
“—thisis the kind of woman who is going to get our country back on track. None of that city-woman, equality-of-the-sexes bullshit. No. This is a wholesome, traditional Aryan wife.” He clicked through my Instagram pictures, creating a flipbook effect of me smiling all over this farm. Me in front of the barn, me in front of a cake mixer, me sitting on the front porch, caressing my bump. “Man, if more families in America acted like this family …think about it. Celebrating nuclear families instead of denigrating them. Cherishing the separate and equally valuable roles of man and wife instead of constantly challenging them. Eating local, working the land, and spreading good Christian values.” The bearded man laughed heartily. “I’ve gotta say, I’m sold! We’re going to talk more about this after a quick break from our sponsors …”
I disappeared from the screen, replaced by a stock image of three tubs of protein powder. As the man began to read from a prewritten script—“CardioChocoBoom is clinically guaranteed to increase your muscle mass by six hundred percent”—I turned to Caleb and said, “What’s happening?”
“This is one of the most popular daily talk shows online, Natalie. It’s ahugedeal—and he found you thanks to me. You know how I have those internet friends?”
“Of course I do.”Internet buddies,my mother had repeated faithfully, in summation of his forty-minute rant.Man-o-sphere.That woman had the patience of an actual saint.
“Well,this guyis in one of them! I had no clue, because all the usernames in the forums are anonymous, but he was there! The whole time! Talking with me and the other guys like a totally regular person! Can you believe it?”
I glanced again at the bearded man, who looked like a totally regular person to me. “And you talked about me in your … forum?”
Caleb nodded vigorously. “I talked all about our ranch, and I shared a picture from your account. The eight-months-pregnant one?”
I nodded. That one had performed relatively well for my account. A few hundred likes, a handful of cheery, generic farming comments from other cheery, generic farming accounts.#pregnantmommalife
Caleb seemed aware that I wasn’t processing this information in the way that he would have liked me to, and so he said again, “Natalie, this is a huge deal. This guy hastens of millionsof subscribers. I bet you’re getting hundreds of new followers right now.”
I pulled out my phone right as the bearded man returned from his ad break. “Now, like I was saying,” he said, but the rest of the sentence was lost to me, because I had just seen my follower count: ten thousand.
“What every man needs to dohisjob is a wife who can doherjob. This, right here, this Natalie Heller Mills? That is a wife who does her job. I mean, look at her. Baking her own bread, milking their own cows, keeping their childrenhealthyandsafeandnurtured—”
