Page 125 of Just (Fake) Married
“For what it’s worth,” he said. “I really thought the two of you had something special. Something real.”
We did, I wanted to say.
Instead, I got in the truck and drove the couple of miles from the McGraw lodge back to the Calloway cabin.
It felt like I’d gone back in time, walking up to the front door. My mom’s diet coke can artwork out front. The sound of thealpacas waking up in the side yard. How was I back here again? What was wrong with me that I couldn’t move on? Why was I stuck?
When I came in the house, the animals surging ahead of me to sniff their familiar ground, Mom came out of her bedroom in her robe, her hair in a long braid down her back.
“Harmony!” she said. “What are you…?”
I couldn’t hold back the tears anymore and I dropped the bags at my feet, shoulders slumped, and just wailed. Mom rushed across the room and pulled me into her arms. I braced myself for all of it. TheI toldyou soand theMcGraws cannot be trusted.
But all she did was hold me and let me cry.
THIRTY
ETHAN
Carter: Emergency McGraw camping trip.
Mac: Carter, it’s five am, we need more notice.
Carter: We leave tomorrow morning at dawn.
Mac: Why?
Carter: Because Ethan’s a fool.
Tag: I’ll be there.
Mac: I’ll bring the beer.
Ethan: This is not my fault.
Carter: It’s totally Ethan’s fault.
Mac: How so?
Carter: Because the idiot fell in love and he doesn’t even realize it.
I half wonderedif my brothers were taking me camping so they could shoot me and no one would know it. Because the way they were acting towards me, they definitely wanted to shoot me.
It was two miles up to Sugar Creek at the edge of the property line between McGraw and Calloway land and I got the silent treatment the whole time.
“You called this camping trip,” I said to Carter, turning around on the horse Tag had saddled for me. Diablo. I should have known I was getting his horse as a punishment. Slow as molasses, he walked up to every bush trying to rub me right off of him.
When I nudged him to speed up, he bucked. Just a little. Enough to tell me he wouldn’t be having any of that.
“Jesus, Diablo.”
He flung his head around and stopped dead in the middle of the trail to have an enormous pee.
The boys all passed me without a word. Years ago, they would have tossed a dozen jokes on my head. Laughed all the way to the campground about how I couldn’t control my horse. But all they did was glare at me as they went by.
It was a gorgeous day. The sun was a butter ball in a sky so blue it seemed like something I could reach up and touch. It was the kind of day that would normally send a spike of dopamine through me. The vitamin D uptake alone would do me good for weeks. But I was numb to all of it. There was an anxious ticker tape running through the back of my head every second.
What happened? Why did she do this? Was she okay?
