Page 99 of Just (Fake) Married
Mac grunted.
“You good?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, his gaze drifting in the direction of the Goods and Provision where I could see Harmony helping a customer through the window.
“What is the deal with the Calloway girls?” I asked.
Was it just this town that allowed Harmony to get so deep under my skin, so fast? Our fake marriage? The sex? What?
Why had I looked at her this morning and thought I wasn’t ready to leave? I’d been ready to leave this town since I was born. Staying here meant giving up everything I’d worked so hard to accomplish. It meant changing who I was.
Mac tilted his cowboy hat back on his head. “Like why are they such pains in the ass?”
“Why do they always seem to…matter so much to us?” I asked.
Mac whistled and clapped me on the shoulder. “Sounds like this fake marriage of yours is going great.”
“You and Amity, you’ve been at each other’s throats for years. Why do they have so much power?”
Mac took a deep breath. I used to think he was the most straightforward of all of us. He loved the land. Loved his horses. For a lot of years, he loved Amity Calloway.
“You ever hear of generational trauma?” Mac asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I am a doctor. How do you know about generational trauma?”
“Well, I think that the Calloways are our generational trauma and some of us are cursed to love them and some of us are cursed to hate them. And if you stay in this town long enough, you’ll probably get around to doing both.”
He looked down the road at The Last Meal Café where Amity was putting out a sandwich board with the specials on it. She spotted us sitting in Mac’s truck and gave us a double bird.
“You know the worst part?” Mac said. “She used to be my best friend. And yeah, now, I hate her. I do. The shit we did to each other is unforgivable. But damn…I miss my friend.”
I pushed openthe door to the shop and the bell rang, but there was no barking or honking. At the front desk where I expected to see Harmony, stood Monica. As soon as she spotted me, her smile turned into a tight line of lips.
“Good morning,” I said, and she only nodded at me. She wore a crocheted shawl over a turtleneck, her beigey red curls in a big cloud around her head. “I thought I saw Harmony-”
“She’s upstairs.” Monica said, and looked back down at the book she was reading.
“Oh, she’s cleaning things out?”
“That’s what she says,” Monica turned the page on her book and never looked back at me. It was about as clear a message as one person could give another. Monica would not be giving me the time of day. And suddenly, I was tired of being the bad guy in all the stories. I stepped forward and cleared my throat until she looked at me.
“Mrs. Calloway, I get how you must not be thrilled with how all this went down, but I’m not the villain.”
She snapped her book closed and looked at me. “Not thrilled? That my daughter was pressured into a marriage by a man I loathed? That she’s somehow meant to assume the responsibility of the success of this entire town? That the man she’s married to is someone I know broke her heart once already? Because I could see it in her face, back when she was in high school, every time she mentioned your name, and said what a jerk you were, that really she was sweet on you.”
“Well,” I said, shoving my hands into my jean pockets. “When you put it like that…”
“I think all you McGraws know how to do is go after the thing you want, no matter who gets hurt. Because that’s exactly how Leroy was.”
I didn’t like that. Being thrown in with my dad.
“I’m doing the best I can,” I said. “Just like Harmony.”
“It’s funny,” Monica said, with a sad twist to her mouth. “That’s exactly what your father said to me as he was breaking my heart.”
TWENTY-FOUR
HARMONY
