You Think It, I'll Say It(43)
The camp had been owned by the same family for several generations, and an eccentric great-uncle who taught archery wrote the newsletter. The item about Lucy was just a paragraph and not particularly fawning—“It’s always fun to see what former camper and counselor Lucy ‘the Prairie Wife’ Headrick née Lucy Nilsson is up to”—but Kirsten couldn’t believe it. Though she didn’t own any of Lucy Headrick’s cookbooks and had never seen her television show, she knew enough about her to find it hilarious. She knew that Lucy Headrick was gorgeous (she had long blond hair and magnificent cheekbones), was married to a man, and was, in some conservative-flavored way, religious. Kirsten was so excited to tell Casey that she let Jack get out of bed. They went into the den, where Casey and Ian were watching football, Kirsten carrying the camp newsletter. But it turned out that although Kirsten had mentioned Lucy to Casey, Casey had never heard of the Prairie Wife, so Kirsten’s ostensible bombshell was less satisfying to drop than she’d anticipated.
That might have been that—a funny coincidence—except that a week later, at the digital-map-data company where she works, Kirsten passed Frank’s office while he was watching Lucy Headrick make chicken-and-dumpling soup online. “I’m decompressing,” Frank said. “I just turned in a test tally.”
Kirsten held up her palms and said, “Hey, no judgment.” She almost didn’t say it, but then, pointing at the computer screen, she did. “I kind of know her.”
Frank raised one eyebrow, which was a gesture Kirsten suspected he had, in his adolescence, practiced at great length. Frank was her age, the son of Thai immigrants, and he was married to a white guy who was a dermatologist. Kirsten liked Frank okay—she respected his attention to detail—but she didn’t really trust him.
Frank said, “Do go on.”
She tried to think of reasons that not trusting Frank mattered and couldn’t come up with any. Once, she had considered her hookups with Lucy to be her most damning secret, but now, ironically, they were probably the most interesting thing about her, even if Casey had been underwhelmed.
“I haven’t seen her since the mid-nineties, but we worked at a camp a few hours north of here,” Kirsten said, then added, “We slept together a bunch of times.”
“No. Fucking. Way.” Frank looked elated. He made a lascivious “Mm-mm-mm” sound and said, “You and the Prairie Wife as baby dykes. I love it.”
“Actually,” Kirsten said, “I looked it up, and I’m pretty sure Lucy lives about forty-five minutes west of St. Louis. Which, for one thing, that’s not exactly the rural farmlands, right? And, also, it’s been a while since I took social studies, but is Missouri even a prairie state?”
“She’s a fraud,” Frank said happily. “A fraudulent butter-churning bitch.”
That was three months ago, and since then, without really meaning to, Kirsten has become close friends with Frank. The reassuring part is that, if anything, he monitors Lucy’s activities more avidly than Kirsten does—surely his avidity has egged on her own—and Lucy is the subject of 90 percent of all discussions between them. The unsettling part is that Frank also follows several other celebrities as enthusiastically yet spitefully; Kirsten isn’t sure where he finds the time.
* * *
—
When Kirsten arrives at work twenty-five minutes late, Frank appears on the threshold of her office and gleefully whispers, “There. Is. A. Shit. Storm. Brewing.”
Calmly, Kirsten says, “Oh?” This is the way Frank greets her approximately twice a week. But it turns out that a shit storm is brewing: Someone on Kirsten’s team stored sample data, data belonging to a national courier company, in the area of the server where production can access it, even though the agreement with the courier company hasn’t yet been formalized. Their boss, Sheila, is trying to figure out who messed up, whether anyone from production has used the data, and, if so, how to remove it.
As Kirsten steels herself to speak with Sheila, Frank, who is still standing there, says, “Has your copy of your girlfriend’s book arrived?”
“I didn’t preorder it. I’m stopping at the store on the way home.”
“Well, as soon as you finish, give it to me. Because I am not putting one penny in the coffers of that whore.”
“Yeah, so you’ve said.” Kirsten squeezes past him.
She definitely isn’t the one who failed to sequester the sample data, but it’s unclear if Sheila believes her. They have a forty-minute conversation that contains about two minutes’ worth of relevant information and instruction and thirty-eight minutes of Sheila venting about how at best they’ve embarrassed themselves and at worst they’re facing a copyright lawsuit. When Kirsten has a chance to check Lucy’s various social media accounts, she finds that they’re all filled with book promotions. On Twitter and elsewhere is a selfie of Lucy and the host of The Mariana Show in the greenroom; their heads are pressed together, and they’re beaming.
After two meetings and a conference call, Kirsten gets lunch from a sandwich place around the corner, and it’s while she’s waiting in line for turkey and Swiss cheese on multigrain bread that she receives Frank’s text: a screenshot from the website of a weekly celebrity magazine, with the headline PRAIRIE WIFE COMES OUT AS BISEXUAL. The first one and a half sentences of the article, which are all that’s visible, read, “Sources confirm that cookbook writer and television personality Lucy Headrick, known to fans as the Prairie Wife, revealed during today’s taping of The Mariana Show that she has dated multiple women. The married mother of three, who—”