Page 3 of Just (Fake) Married (Calloways vs. McGraws #1)
ONE
HARMONY
Fourteen Years Later
It involves the following:
A warm cup of tea.
A sharp pencil.
A clean piece of paper.
Snow falling outside the big window of Last Chance Goods and Provisions is a plus, but not a guarantee.
“Harmony!” Chuck Swift yelled from the back corner of the store. “You got chicken feed in yet?”
“Not yet. The shipment got snowed in outside of Boise. Supposed to arrive tomorrow.”
Chuck lived in a trailer way up on Widow’s Peak. And you’d never guess by the hair in his ears, his sparkling way with people or the English language, but he made the best barbecue in the state of Wyoming. Probably in Montana too.
The guy was a barbecue savant.
A former cook on a chuck wagon, he opened up his BBQ joint and served it directly from his trailer, which was probably in violation of twenty-five health code violations, but no one around these parts cared because the food was so good.
His was an unusual business plan. He only opened when he felt like it. He only made what he felt like. And the only way anyone knew when he was going to be open, was me.
The flaws in the system were legion.
“I’m cooking today,” he said at the register. He had to move his beard aside so he could dig his wallet out of the chest pocket of his old overalls.
I flipped the sign in my store window for Chuck’s BBQ to Open.
“Whatcha making?”
“Brisket. Beef ribs.”
I spun the little wheel underneath the sign to the image of a cow.
This was it. His whole marketing campaign. Open or Closed and type of animal. Most likely, he would sell out by three pm.
Chuck grumbled his way out the door, sending the bell over the door ringing, letting in a blast of frigid air and Mrs. McCormick, the best teacher in the Gulch, if I had anything to say about it.
“Oh! It’s a cold one out there!” she cried, unwrapping her scarf so I could see her face. Her glasses steamed up in the heat of the store. “Harmony!”
Like it would be anyone else here at the store. But that was Mrs. McCormick, always happy to see people, as if she’d been missing them for years, even though it had only been days.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes, dear. Feels like the Christmas to New Year’s break is years, instead of just one week.”
“So are you, Mrs. McCormick. And I’m happy to be back.”
“Dear, when are you going to finally start calling me Dottie? You haven’t been in my class for decades.”
“Wait? Are you calling me old?” I asked.
I couldn’t call her Dottie. It just wouldn’t come out of my mouth.
“Only one of us is old,” she said, and came over to press her cool face to mine. “But it isn’t you. You look adorable. That color is so good on you.”
I wore an old, navy blue sweater, a bright yellow knit cap, and fuzzy purple fingerless gloves, because, despite the potbelly stove going full blast in the corner, it was cold in the nooks and crannies of our old store.
“You need help with anything?” I asked her.
“No. I’m just going to poke around. I’ll holler if I need you.”
She wiped the steam off her glasses and headed back into the packed shelves of our family store, the old wooden floors squeaking as she went.
I looked down at my blank piece of paper and waited for Mrs. McCormick to decide she needed me after all.
“Harmony!” Mrs. McCormick’s voice came from the far back corner of the store, in the hardware section. “Could you help me?”
“Of course!” I yelled, and got off my stool to go find her. From her bed behind the cash register, Jenny, my blind Border Collie, lifted her head, sensing my movement, and barked in a panic.
Jenny was not taking losing her eyesight well.
Luckily, I’d found the solution to that problem, and beside her in her bed was Bruce. A white goose who’d been injured and stranded on our property last spring. Her wing never healed right and she claimed Jenny and me as her own.
Bruce honked once and rested her elegant, long head on Jenny’s furry one. Jenny settled back down to sleep. Bruce did the same, laying herself down beside her in the dog bed.
Odd though they were, they were my constant companions, and should my New Year’s resolution be to form a country band, I would call it Jenny and The Bruce.
“Hey, Mrs. McCormick,” I said, when I found her amongst the aisles.
The low ceiling was still decorated with white Christmas lights. I didn’t take down the lights until the last thaw. January and February were hard enough. Twinkle lights made everything better.
“Do you have anything that will kill a ground squirrel?” She lifted her glasses so she could read the back of a box of rat poison.
“What? Like…a trap?”
“Yes!” She turned wide, blue eyes on me and jerked her head so her glasses fell back down on her nose. “You have any of those?”
“I don’t think anyone does.”
“How about a bear trap?”
“Those are outlawed.”
“Yeah,” she said, dropping her voice. “But you have one in the back, right?”
“Mrs. McCormick, what exactly are you trying to kill?”
“Nothing all that important.”
That didn’t sound suspicious.
“We have bear repellant,” I said, and she put the rat poison back on the shelf.
“Where?” she asked, and I showed her to the section.
“Can I help you with anything else?”
She had been my fifth grade teacher, and I’d loved her with the kind of purity only a fifth grade girl could have for her favorite teacher. But she’d retired last year and now I was a little worried about her. I hoped killing things wasn’t becoming her new hobby.
“No, honey. You’re a dear. I’m all right,” she patted my arm with her hand, and I left her with her ground squirrel killing plan to go back to the front desk and my New Year’s Resolution.
The key to a quality New Year’s Resolution was that you had to pick only one. Pick too many, get spread too thin, and you wouldn’t hit any of them. But you needed one that was just a little out of reach. Not impossible, but something you had to work for. Something you had to earn.
The way I saw it, my resolution options were…
Drink more water .
This was an option every year. There was something about it that wasn’t…sexy enough. Also water was…watery. But, it was on the list.
Be nicer to the McGraws.
The planning for the Feud Day Festival would start in a few weeks, and if there was ever an opportunity to attempt this, it would be at our town hall meetings, where the locals got together to discuss the upcoming festival activities.
Once upon a time, the Feud Day Festival had been a big deal in these parts. People would come from all over to watch the (literal) re-enactments of the bloodiest, most heartbreaking days in the feud between the Calloways and McGraws.
Kind of like a morbid personal theme park.
But, as my generation of Calloways and McGraws got older, we all bailed on participating in the re-enactments.
Sunshine got an early admission into college and left for New York.
After the pantry incident, I decided I didn’t want anything to do with the McGraws, and Mom and Dad wouldn’t force me.
My three younger siblings, Amity, Bliss, and Boone, took their cues from me, and also decided that all things related to the festival were lame… so everything just fell apart.
Other people in town played the parts of the McGraws and the Calloways, which didn’t bring the same tension or interest to tourists. And the fewer people that came, the fewer activities the Festival Committee planned, and the whole thing just got smaller and smaller each year.
Three years ago, we lost our Wyoming State Blue Ribbon Award for Best Community Festival and the Gulch had been a Blue Ribbon town since the first year the State awarded the distinction, forty years ago.
And for forty years our whole town prospered.
Local businesses, the economy. People visited our town, loved it so much, they moved here.
We were able to build the health clinic, and improve the roads, and build the new gymnasium for the school. Everything was better.
But we lost the Blue Ribbon, and it hurt.
The clinic lost the full-time doctor. The repairs to the trailer park were postponed. So were the bridge repairs over Blood Red Rapids and the park planned next to Dead Man’s Quarry.
I blamed Leroy McGraw and his antiquated, stupid ideas, and his iron fist in controlling the planning committee.
At the rate we were going, the festival would be gone in a few years.
And what would happen to this town? Nothing good. Nothing I wanted to think about.
The truth was, in some ways (in a lot of ways, really) it felt like Last Hope Gulch was dying. A slow, withering death. And I couldn’t help but feel like I’d played a tiny part in that, by refusing to be in the re-enactments because of that dumb high school moment with Ethan.
So if we were going to make the Feud Day Festival a big deal again, someone had to make the first move. And it felt like it should be me.
Sunshine would tell me I was an “extreme people pleaser” and that, “it wasn’t my job to make everyone happy.”
Which…whatever.
Being nice to the McGraws so that we could restore glory to The Feud Day Festival and get our town off life support seemed like a long shot, but I put it on the list.
Move out of Mom’s House.
Our dad had died over five years ago, and it was easy to say that I’d moved home with Mom because she needed me. However, the truth was, I’d failed out of grad school, got dumped by my boyfriend, and I had nowhere else to go. There just wasn’t a good enough reason to leave after that.
But I was twenty-eight now, and it seemed like I was stuck. Unlike my other siblings, who had all moved on with their lives.
Our youngest brother, Boone, had joined the military the day he’d turned eighteen and had been deployed for years, only coming home on the very occasional visit. Bliss had floated around for a while, but had settled down in the apartment above the bar, and Amity had had her shit together at age 10.
I didn’t think Sunshine was ever going to leave New York.
Which left me as the lone, lost Calloway sibling still living at home.