Page 8 of Just (Fake) Married (Calloways vs. McGraws #1)

FOUR

HARMONY

Harmony: Hey. There’s been some news in town.

Sunshine: Let me guess… a cow got out of its pen and stood in the town square and wouldn’t move. The whole town had to vote about what to do with the cow. Now the cow is Mayor. Mayor Gallup is very perturbed.

Harmony: No. This is serious.

Sunshine: Did you adopt another pet?

Harmony: No. Leroy McGraw died.

Sunshine: Really? Really…

Harmony: We’re going to the will reading.

Sunshine: What? Why?

Harmony: Don’t really know. Guess we’ll find out.

What did one wear to a will reading? Should I dress like it was a party? Something glittery?

I had on a New Year’s dress from a few years ago that made me sparkle. I imagined showing up in that dress and delighting in their reaction. Ethan’s, in particular.

“You can’t wear that,” Bliss said. She was laying across my single bed. The same bed I’d had since I’d been kicked out of the crib by Bliss. The quilt Mom made out of my old t-shirts had fallen on the floor. “It’s a funeral. Not a rave.”

“Do we care?” I asked.

“True,” she said, with a shrug. “Wear it.”

Leroy McGraw’s lawyer, one Gordan Prescott, Esquire, a sweaty, nervous fellow, showed up at our house yesterday afternoon with a letter for my mom from beyond the grave. Leroy McGraw had written a letter. To. My. Mother. On his death bed, with the intent that it be delivered after his death.

My mom had read the letter, started crying, then looked at me and said, “Tell your sisters. We need to be at the will reading tomorrow at noon.”

Just that. Nothing else. She wouldn’t let me see the letter, wouldn’t talk about what he’d written. Nothing.

Now my sisters were crammed into the house, while we prepared to make our way over to the Swinging D to hear what Leroy McGraw had to say as part of his final will and testament.

“I don’t know,” I said, pulling a sweater and a bra off the full-length mirror so I could see my reflection.

Oh. My legs look awesome. “I mean, I want to make a statement, but I don’t want to be disrespectful.”

“I do,” Bliss said, striking a pose on my bed.

She looked like she was going to be working a shift at her bar and was counting on her tits to make her rent. We caught eyes and she pulled the V-neck of her tight, black t-shirt down even lower, making both of us laugh.

“You seem more cheerful than I expected,” I said to her, reaching into my closet to pull out something more ‘last will and testament.’ It was a black wrap dress that I wore when I thought my boyfriend was going to propose. Instead, he dumped me.

Did that make it a bad luck dress?

But it made my ass look great and it had pockets.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen some of these McGraws. You think some of them went bald and got hideously scarred in an evil experiment?”

She got up off my squawky, single bed and zipped the back of my dress.

Ethan hadn’t gotten bald or scarred.

Yesterday, he had looked good. Really good.

All those handsome, heartbreaker looks in high school had sharpened and hardened into something…

dangerous. Something so focused it was breath-taking.

When he’d turned those stupid, blue eyes on me in the road, I’d felt like a highschooler again, showing up at his locker after that party, thinking something important was going to change.

Yeah, he’d been good looking in high school, now he was devastating.

I wished I had punched him in that pantry.

“I don’t think their luck runs that way,” I said. I met my sister’s eyes in the mirror and I smiled at her.

“Are you nervous?” she asked me.

“Why would I be nervous?”

“There’s no point in lying to me. I’m the one who collected all those ping pong balls from my gym class so you could stuff them into Ethan’s locker at school. You had a thing for him.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

Thankfully, Amity burst into my bedroom door in a tight, denim dress that featured both tits and ass, along with her cowboy boots. Her hair was pulled back in a low ponytail and she wore red danger lipstick. Because she also had a reason to want to look killer good.

“Jesus, Amity,” Bliss chuckled. “You planning on making Mac McGraw swallow his tongue?”

“Sure am,” she said, with a smile that was as cold as ice.

Amity took Bliss’s spot on my bed and my tiny room was suddenly too crowded.

My twin bed was shoved under the window with my overflowing bookshelf beside it. My dresser was on the other side of the tiny room next to the closet. In between my bed and the closet was roughly three feet of space, that was always cluttered with dog toys, my shoes and dirty clothes.

It wasn’t that I was messy, but in a room this size, if I wasn’t constantly cleaning up, it looked like a mess.

“Don’t we need to go?” Amity asked, glancing down at her watch.

“Yeah. I just need Mom to get out of the bathroom…”

“I can’t believe you still live here with that terrible bathroom,” Amity said, flopping backwards on the twin bed.

There were five siblings at one point sharing that bathroom when we were growing up. The water pressure was terrible. The hot water tank was miniscule. My brother got to the point where he just peed outside, and half the time, I did too, because a girl had to do what a girl had to do.

“What do you think is going to happen today?” Amity asked.

“Why do you think I know?” I asked her.

“Because you should have gotten more of the story out of Mom last night.”

Amity sighed, looking up at the ceiling, her arms flung out to the sides. Honestly, sometimes she was so dramatic. “If Mac is there-”

“Of course, he’s going to be there,” I said. “It’s his father’s will.”

“Well, I’m not looking at him if he is.”

“You’re probably going to have to look at him,” I said, pulling tights on under my dress in deference to the winter.

“I can close my eyes.” She threw an arm over her face like a Victorian woman with the vapors, and I caught Bliss rolling her eyes.

Amity and Mac had not-so-secretly dated all through high school. Extremely hot and then extremely cold. It had been exhausting and dramatic.

Senior year, something happened, and it all fell apart.

Since then, they weren’t just cold to each other. They were repellant.

Where Amity was, Mac wasn’t. Where Mac was, Amity wasn’t. And, despite the years passing, that didn’t change.

Today might be the first time they were in the same room together in a long time, so I understood my sister’s dramatics in this case. Regardless of anything that happened today, she was going to have to see Mac, and it was going to sting.

“Girls,” Mom came into my room wearing loose black pants, a gauzy black shirt, and an elaborate silk and velvet knee length kimono over it. She wore her silver necklaces and her bangles. But not her rings. She only wore one, a small diamond I’d never seen before. She looked like a queen.

Jenny and Bruce, wondering what everyone was doing, came wandering down the hallway and into my room.

Now it was officially way too crowded.

Maybe I should have made moving out the priority on the resolution list.

“Excuse me,” I said, and squeezed through the bedroom door to quickly hit the bathroom before we left. I could hear Jenny barking and Bruce honking.

“We should take them with us,” Bliss called out to me. “That might get us kicked out of there quickly.”

When I got out of the bathroom, my family was down in the living room and I went to join them. My hair was up and my lipstick, while not as viper red as my sister’s, was still a statement. My black cowboy boots made me feel like I was going to kick ass and take names.

“Look at you three,” Mom said, and reached out for our hands. “You’re beautiful, strong, fierce women and I couldn’t be prouder of you.”

My sisters and I looked sideways at each other.

Mom said this kind of thing to us all the time.

She’d been a real believer in positive reinforcement.

When I flunked out of grad school and came home with a broken heart, she’d wrapped her arms around me and let me cry.

Then she’d dried my tears and told me I’d done a good job crying it all out.

“Remember,” she said to us. “No matter what happens today, we will be fine.”

“That sounds ominous,” Amity said.

“I still can’t believe we’re going,” Bliss said. “But if we have to, I think we should steal something.”

“Bliss,” Mom scolded.

“What? For all that historical crap they did to us. It’s time for payback. Let’s take some of their shit.”

Bliss sometimes could be just as dramatic as Amity.

“Come on,” I said, pulling on my coat. We could stand here and talk about what was going to happen for the next five years, it was one of our greatest strengths.

But Bliss wasn’t totally off the mark. I wanted to drink their fine booze and eat their fine food and maybe check out what their powder room situation looked like over there.

Rumor was, that house had four separate bathrooms.

Four. Of. Them.

“Let’s go and show them that we don’t give a single shit about this nonsense.”

Who I should have been worried about was my mom.

She was the one who surprised all of us.