Page 22 of Just (Fake) Married (Calloways vs. McGraws #1)

“No, I wouldn’t buy it either,” Bliss said. “What if…what if…well, what if you had a little thing in high school, but after he went off to college, you started writing each other?”

“Writing Ethan?”

“Emails. Postcards. Letters,” Amity said. “This could work.”

“You started writing Ethan while he was away in college,” Bliss said, Crossing her long denim covered legs. “And over time, your feelings for each other just kept building up, so that when he finally came home…Bam.”

“Bam?” I asked. Bam, I kind of understood. Bam was how this whole thing felt. One day my life was recognizable, the next I was having multiple orgasms on a couch with my husband.

“Yeah, like insta-love, only not, because you spent those years really getting to know each other. Because there is nothing you didn’t share in your letters to one another.”

Amity and I looked at Bliss like she was a stranger. Bliss was not a romantic. She was the opposite of a romantic. A dead-eyed realist who didn’t believe in love.

Or so I thought.

“I’ll come up with something,” I said. “Now, both of you shoo. If that poster is still up, I’m in for a doozy of a day.”

It was exactly as I predicted. As soon as Amity and Bliss left, the door didn’t stay closed for more than a few minutes. Each time the bell over the door rang, Jenny got upset, which made Bruce honk, until finally I took the damn bell down.

It was official. I was the center of town gossip.

Damn that stupid wanted sign.

Mayor Gallup walked in with Ida and Irma Strunk.

Great. Just Great. Nosy, Nosier and Nosiest.

Mayor Gallup had the easiest job in the world being Mayor of Last Hope Gulch, and he kept getting reelected because he was a good old boy with a couple of NFR championship buckles, and those kinds of credentials went far in this town.

Of course, that he was a good friend of Leroy McGraw didn’t hurt.

He was also older than dirt. Honest-to-God.

He might have been witness to the last McGraw and Calloway marriage back before WWII between Caleb McGraw and Mary Jane Calloway.

Two star-crossed lovers. In the fine tradition of the feud, their families refused to let them marry, so they eloped.

It might have ended happily for them, only Caleb enlisted after Pearl Harbor and died in the battle of Normandy, and Mary Jane, heartbroken, lived the rest of her life alone.

“Hello, Harmony,” Mayor Gallup said.

“Hello, Mayor,” I said, throwing the bell I’d taken off it’s hanger into my purse, under the cash register. It wasn’t so much a purse at this point, but a traveling junk drawer. “What can I do for you?”

“Well,” Mayor Gallup laughed and hooked a thumb in his belt, leaning against my cash register like he was an extra in an old western movie. “I’m hoping you can maybe clear up some rumors I’ve heard.”

“I doubt it, I don’t pay much attention to rumors,” I said.

“Is it true that you’re married to Ethan McGraw?

” Ida Strunk, owner of the B&B on the west corner of town, not to be confused with her sister Irma, whose B&B was on the east corner, asked.

Despite being twins, the two women were nothing alike.

Ida dressed in shades of blue and black, long skirts, orthopedic shoes, and sweaters with Kleenex stuffed in the wrists.

Irma had pink hair and wore bikinis to the public pool. She’d been Miss Wyoming in 1982 and she liked to tell people about it.

“Ida,” Irma tried to stop her, with a manicured hand against Ida’s sweater, covered in cat hair. Irma’s nails had little lady bugs on them. “That’s none of our business.”

“It is too our business. You and I both know that McGraw/Calloway drama is good for tourism in this town,” Ida told her sister. “And we need all the tourists we can get. We’re invested in this as much as she is.”

Ida wasn’t wrong. After all, that’s why we were doing this. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I am.”

“Well, now,” Mayor Gallup said, pushing his hat off his head. “You can appreciate that this comes as some surprise to those of us in town.”

“Comes as a surprise to me, too,” I said with a smile.

“I think there’s something fishy about this,” Ida said, giving me the stink eye. I wasn’t there, but I’d bet money Ida was born with a stink eye.

I always wondered how she stayed in business all these years. Her beds were as hard as her scones and she had three too many cats. However, Irma’s B&B, the Good Night Inn, was charming, and her scones were delicious.

Except she charged double, so the battle between the two sisters raged on.

“Why fishy?” I asked Ida.

“Ethan hasn’t been in this town in ages, and Lord knows you never leave, so when did this romance happen?” Ida asked.

“Hi, Ms. Calloway!” A group of three high schoolers called out to me in unison, to let me know they were here before they began to forage for gum, beef jerky and Arizona Iced tea. Standard teenage girl diet.

“Our romance started in high school,” I told Ida. “Only it was…forbidden.”

The girls came up with their pile of goods, and the words romance, forbidden and high school obviously caught their attention.

“Because of the feud?” Irma asked, a total sucker for romance. Her B&B was full of romance novels people could read while they were staying there, and take home if they didn’t finish.

“Yes, Ethan and I had to keep everything secret. And when he left for college…I…I…” Okay, I couldn’t come up with anything better, so I was just going for it. “I started writing him letters.”

“Letters?” Marion Blackfeather, one of the girls in the teen group asked me. Marion’s mom was Dr. Sandra Blackfeather, who ran a health clinic in town. “You mean emails?”

“Right, of course, emails.”

“More fishiness,” Ida said, glaring at me. There was not a romantic bone in Ida’s body.

“Anyway, in our emails we could say whatever we wanted to each other,” I said, recalling Bliss’s outrageous story. “All of our walls were down and we just really poured our hearts out to each other. So when he came home and we saw each other again…we just knew.”

The teenagers had their change, but they weren’t leaving.

I searched the faces of my audience. The teen girls nodded in understanding. Irma and the mayor seemed to buy it. Only Ida narrowed her eyes until she was squinting.

“Anyway, it all worked out in the end, now that we’re married.” I said. “Oh, and Mayor Gallup, I was thinking, given that we have a new event in the McGraw/Calloway timeline, maybe now would be the time to re-invest our focus into the Feud Day Festival.”

The festival wasn’t until April, but we needed months to plan if we were going to bring it back to its former glory. So we couldn’t start early enough.

“Seriously?” Marion asked. Given that Marion worked part time over at the historical museum in the municipality building, her interest made sense.

“What a great idea!” Mayor Gallup jumped in. “We could bring back the re-enactments with the actual McGraws and Calloways.”

“The one where Sheriff McGraw shot Esther Calloway in the chest for bootlegging whiskey from Canada?” Irma chimed in. “That one is my favorite.”

“No, my favorite is the one where the original Widow Calloway got shoved off the peak by Duncan McGraw because she refused to marry him. Only to survive, climb back up the peak, and push Duncan McGraw off the same peak,” Marion said, bouncing on her toes.

“She was hanged for that,” I reminded Marion.

“Yeah,” she laughed. “So gruesome.”

“I like the wedding,” Ida said, and we all stared at her. Ida Strunk liked the only sort of happy event in the Calloway/McGraw feud?

“She’s always had a thing for a man in uniform,” Irma said.

“And I like that she got to live her life on her own terms, after he died.”

“Because she was grieving and alone,” Irma cried. The twins were gathering heat for a real argument.

“Yes, yes,” the mayor agreed. “Now is the perfect time to recommit to our once celebrated festival.”

“Maybe you could reach out to the state,” I said to the mayor. “See if they could get someone from the Blue Ribbon committee to come down this year and check it out?”

“Hmmm. Well, we’ll have to think about that. I wouldn’t want to invite someone down unless we were sure we had everybody’s involvement.”

“What we need is a town meeting!” Ida announced. “We can appoint a Feud Day Festival committee who will oversee all activities.”

The girls nodded. “We’ll tell our parents,” they said.

“I’ll pick a date and put it on the community board,” the mayor said. “This is very exciting news. Very exciting!”

“A whole new chapter for the feud,” Marion said.

“Yeah,” Ida said. “Let’s hope this time you both live.”

The door opened again, only this time it was Mrs. McCormick who walked in and barreled right past everyone else to throw her arms around me. The Darryls were right behind her in their orange Carhartt jumpsuits.

“Honey,” Mrs. McCormick cried, clutching my neck. “You’ve gone and surprised us all, getting married to that handsome McGraw boy. You know, he was always my favorite of that family. So bright.”

“Dottie,” Mayor Gallup said. “We’re going to need to call together the town council to schedule an official meeting to discuss new plans for the Feud Day Festival.”

Mrs. McCormick clapped her hands with excitement and then reached for mine to squeeze them. “Harmony, do you think we can do it? Do you think we can get all the McGraws and Calloways to participate again? It will be just like old times!”

“No, Mrs. McCormick,” Marion said. “Like new times. Ethan McGraw and Harmony Calloway…the newest chapter in the Last Hope Gulch legend. It’s going to be epic.”

I smiled, feeling, for the first time, a little guilty that we were lying to everyone. I had to remind myself we were doing it for the right reasons.

“Yes!” I said with real enthusiasm. “It’s going to be epic.”