Page 9 of Just (Fake) Married
“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 herfavorite 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 theircues 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.
