Page 43 of Just (Fake) Married
Harmony: No comment.
“Rise and shine, Harmony.”
I blinked. Then blinked again. Sunlight coming through my window pierced my brain through my eyeballs. I put a hand over my face to protect myself, but it was too late, I’d already seen him. Ethan. In the doorway of my bedroom. He looked so dark and masculine against my pink walls and the pictures of my sisters I’d hung on the wall. What was happening right now? Like any morning after a reckless night of drinking, I took a quick assessment of the situation.
In my bed. Check.
In my pajamas. Check.
Ethan had driven me home and walked me to my front door. Check.
Now he was in my bedroom telling me to rise and shine.
NOT. CHECK.
I sat up and prayed to the heavens my boob wasn’t hanging out of my tank top.
“What the hell are you…” I stopped when I saw my mom standing behind Ethan, wringing her hands. “Mom? You let him in my room?”
“He said you agreed to this last night,” Mom said.
“Because we’re going to the chapel, and we’re gonna get married,” Ethan sang.
“We’re just getting a license,” I snapped.
“Yeah, well, there’s no song about that.”
This wasn’t happening. I must still be drunk, because Ethan McGraw was not in my bedroom, surrounded by my girlish stuff, wearing a dopey smile and holding a bag of something that smelled very interesting.
“What’s in the bag?”
“Wasn’t sure what condition you might be in this morning, so I brought you one of Mrs. Walker’s famous hangover cure sandwiches.”
I moaned in gratitude before I could stop myself.
“Look alive,” he said, and tossed the bag towards me. I made no move to catch it and it hit me in the chest. “We’ll work on that when we’re married. You’ve got twenty minutes to be dressed and out in the car,” he said, and then, like the angel of death, as fast as he arrived, he was gone.
“Honey,” my mother said, coming to sit on the edge of my bed. She wore a pair of overalls and one of Dad’s old Brigham Young University sweatshirts, her hair in two long silver braids down her back. “I don’t know if this is a good idea.”
“What? Me getting married? I have to. You were there, you heard everything Mr. McGraw wrote.” I swung my feet onto my old Hello Kitty rug that I got for my tenth birthday.
“But,” she took my hands in hers, “what if you didn’t? What if you just let this town die the way it probably should have a hundred years ago?”
“What are you saying? This is our home.”
“I’m saying, the Calloways have stayed here for generations getting abused and pushed around by the McGraws. What if we didn’t do it anymore? What if we said enough and we just…left.”
“And went where?”
“Anywhere. There is a huge, wide world out there. We could go to Spain or Montreal or Iowa.”
Iowa?
“Sunshine’s always saying how we could stay with her in New York.”
“New York!” I cried. “We’d never make it in New York. Besides, what about everyone else in this town? Ida and Irma, the Darryls, Mrs. McCormick, Chuck? They’d be lost without us.”
“But why should you have to sacrifice your future for them? Just because Leroy McGraw says so?”
