Page 16 of Just (Fake) Married
I wasn’t in a hurry to get up to the ranch and the drama that waited for me.
Instead of getting back in my car, I modeled her actions with the furry beasts. Clucking my best cluck and swatting them gently on their hindquarters like I would if they were horses.
“So, you living back in the Gulch?” I asked her conversationally.
The last time I’d been home, it had been for my brother Carter’s wife’s funeral.
Harmony hadn’t been living with her mom then. I remembered that. Maybe one of my younger brothers had said something about her being in grad school? It had stuck with me, because I didn’t see Harmony as the type who would ever leave this town.
She, unlike me, loved it here.
“I was sorry to hear about your dad,” she said, instead of answering my question.
Leroy McGraw did not care for the Calloway women. Dad had tried many times over the years to get them to sell him their property, just to make them go away. He’d offer double, triple the value, but Monica, the Calloway matriarch, wouldn’t budge. Not even after her husband died.
“Were you really?” I asked Harmony.
She shrugged. “I’m sorry for your family. It’s always hard to lose someone.”
Like she had lost her dad. Like my brother Carter had lost his wife Lilly.
“You always were too nice for our family feud,” I said to her.
“Because our family feud is stupid,” she said.
“Yes, butourfeud was legendary,” I said with a smile that she did not return. She stared at me, those green eyes like glass.
“Your mom still in the cabin?” I asked, turning to the west where there was a thin stream of smoke coming from behind a small rise in the distance. The Calloway cabin was a low, log building surrounded by Monica Calloway’s sculptures and animals. I’d never been inside, but I imagined it full of witchy girly things.
“Where else would she be?” Harmony asked, shoving the more stubborn alpacas across the driveway. One bleated at herin protest, so I leaned my weight against its other side to get it to move.
“I’m just saying. It’s a tiny cabin, she could sell the land and move into a palace-”
“Now you sound like your father.”
Nothing shut me up faster than being compared to my dad.
The alpacas were finally off the road, and we stood there staring at each other. Jenny and Bruce looking in the opposite directions, like they were a crime-solving duo.
I’m sorry.
I’d said that a bunch of times over the years and I still didn’t know what I was supposed to be sorry for.
You look good.
I could have said that, because it was true. Her pink cheeks, the navy blue coat that made her hair glow and her eyes piercing. Really good. All grown up. She’d been cute back in high school. Now she was…substantial. Real.
Beautiful.
Instead, I rubbed my now numb hands together and asked, “What are you doing with these animals, anyway?”
“Mom…had an idea,” Harmony said.
I laughed. Their mom was great with the ideas, not so much with the follow through.
“Don’t you have a funeral you have to get to?” she asked, trying to get rid of me.
“No funeral,” I said.
