Page 63 of Just (Fake) Married
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 backbefore 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 wordsromance, forbiddenandhigh schoolobviously 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.
