by Kimberly Fox
My arms drop to my sides as an empty pit forms in my stomach. “And Nick wants to close the factory?”
Tyler nods his frustratingly beautiful head.
“I told you the truth,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “If I become the boss, I give you my word that I’ll keep the factory open in Summerland.”
I raise an eyebrow at him. “And how can I trust you?”
“Because you scare the shit out of me when you’re like this,” he says with a laugh.
My stomach is rolling with nerves as I quickly think it through. I didn’t know there was another person in the running for the job. Now I really have to make sure this sham of a marriage works. It’s crucial that we pull this off.
“All right,” I say, taking a deep breath as my nerves start to settle.
“All right, what?” Tyler asks, gulping as he watches me. “All right, you’ll help me, or all right, you’re going to tell everyone the truth?”
I stare at him for a few seconds letting him stew nervously. “All right, I’ll help you. Nick can’t become the boss.”
Tyler exhales long and hard. “Thank you,” he says, looking relieved. “You must really like that town to stay married to me.”
“I do,” I say, nodding. How can I explain to him what the town really means to me? I grew up in chaos, living in vans and trailers, moving from one hippie commune to another every few months, all while my parents loafed off all day and let me handle the important stuff like making food, money, and paying the bills.
The town of Summerland was the first place that ever felt like home to me. I had moved there by myself in my late teens and had immediately fallen in love. It was stable and sweet and loving and just normal-something I had always dreamed of growing up.
I’ll die before I let it be destroyed.
Tyler’s mother Kirsten rushes over, barely able to contain her excitement. “Eeeee!” she squeals, grabbing my hand and squeezing it so hard that I let out a whimper. “I have a surprise for you!”
I should be happy. Getting a surprise from a billionaire is usually a good thing, but for some reason, a cold chill is snaking down my back, and I feel like I should be running in the opposite direction.
I just hope it’s not what I’m worried it is.
“Mom,” Tyler says, stepping forward. “Dahlia doesn’t really like surprises.”
“Yeah,” I say, shaking my head. “I hate them.”
“Not this one,” she says, squealing as she yanks me in the direction she came. She drags me across the lawn and through the crowd of guests, only stopping when we’re on the stairs leading into the house where everyone can see. I have a really bad feeling about this.
“Excuse me,” she yells, waving her hands in the air to get everyone’s attention. The DJ stops the music, and every head in the enormous backyard turns to look up at me.
Luckily for Tyler, he steps up beside me. I would have killed him later if he would have left me all alone up here.
“I just want to welcome Dahlia to the family,” she says, smiling warmly at me.
Ah. It’s so genuine, which is making it really hard to hate her right now.
“But when my son got married, our family grew by more than just Dahlia,” she says, getting the giggles.
No.
My stomach hardens as the painful realization hits me like a punch in the face.
“We also got Dahlia’s parents!” Kirsten spins on her high heels as she points to the door.
Oh, God—No!.
My blood pressure goes through the roof as my parents appear behind the glass doors, looking like they just walked out of Woodstock, stepped into a time machine, and arrived in the McMillan’s kitchen.
The whole backyard is silent, so everyone hears my mother swearing as she can’t figure out how to open the sliding glass door. The. Sliding. Glass. Door.
How the hell does someone get to be in their fifties and still not know how to open a sliding glass door? Hundreds of LSD hits, that’s how.
Kirsten rushes up the stairs and easily slides the door open for them.
“Hi, Rainbow!” my mother says, waving her hand over her head as she steps through.
I cringe as I hold onto Tyler for support. “Please tell me there’s a rainbow in the sky behind me,” I say, staring in disbelief as the last two people on the planet I would want here walk out.
Tyler looks back and shakes his head. “Sorry. No rainbow in the sky tonight.”
I grit my teeth as they walk down the stairs, smiling from gauged earlobe to gauged earlobe. They know how much I hate my real name, but they still refuse to call me anything but Rainbow Solstice the First, or Rainbow for short.
My body stiffens as my mother throws her arms around me, and a whiff of stale weed hits my nose. The smell always reminds me of my childhood.
“You look so great!” she says, pulling away to look me up and down. “A little mainstream for my tastes, but you still look good.”
“You look good too,” I lie, looking her up and down. “Is that a new burlap shirt?”
She nods proudly. “I made it out of a sack of potatoes.”
I exhale long and slow. “You can’t tell at all.”
“Rainbow!” my father says, pushing past my mom to give me a hug. His long gray hair tickles my face as he squeezes me. “It’s good to see you again! What has it been? Four months? Five?”
“Six years,” I say, cringing as I start to hear whispers and giggles behind me.
The only way these two people would look more out of place is if they sprouted a second head.
“Great party!” my father says, looking around with a nod. He waves to someone near the pool. The man doesn’t wave back. “I brought rolling papers if you guys have weed.”
My mother slaps his arm. “This is a fancy party, Echo. Get the bong from the van.”
My father Bill, or Echo as he likes to be called, turns to head back to his van, so I grab his tie-dye shirt, and yank him back. “No bongs,” I warn him.
He shrugs as he turns back to us. “Good thing I have this little guy,” he says, looking down at the joint sticking out of his shirt pocket. I snatch it and crush it in my fist before he can spark it.
“No drugs.”
Tyler steps in to introduce himself as I glare at the DJ, warning him with my eyes to turn the music back on. Luckily for him, he does, and the guests resume their conversations or begin gossiping about the two disasters that are my parents.
“Hello,” Tyler says, offering his hand as he smiles at my parents. “I’m Dahlia’s husband, Tyler. It’s so nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too, young man,” my father says, trying to act like normal people act but failing miserably. “I’m Echo, and this is my wife, Essence.”
“He’s actually named Bill,” I interrupt, “and her real name is Carol.”
My father looks at me funny. “And your real name is Rainbow Solstice the First.”
“Don’t remind me,” I say, rolling my eyes. “I’m reminded of that every time I have to pull out my passport and the people reading it start laughing.”
“She was always this difficult,” my mother says, smiling at Tyler. “Rainbow always had this extreme need to follow the rules.”
“They’re called laws, mother,” I say, glaring at her. “And they’re what keep society functioning.”
She just shrugs. “I have a different view on how the world should work.”
“An insane view,” I mutter as I look away, feeling an irresistible urge to make a run for it.
“So, what do you do for weed money?” my father asks Tyler.
Tyler chuckles. “I run an international corporation that acquires companies to restructure and optimize to enhance production rates and profits.”
My father just stares at him with a blank expression on his wrinkly face. “Sounds like you can buy a lot of weed.”
Tyler laughs. “I guess I could.”
My father scratches hi
s temple as his face twists up. I can tell he’s trying to think up something intelligent to say. “Do you work at the computer-net?”
“Dad,” I say, interrupting him. “You mean the Internet.”
“Yeah, that’s the store,” he says, pointing at me. He looks down at the old worn out tie-dye shirt that should have been thrown out in the 70s. “I make these shirts,” he says proudly. “My friend Tree Dancer is going to get me into the Internet store to help me sell them.”
My mother nods as she listens. “That’s going to be for our retirement fund.”
To my horror, Kirsten and Mack come creeping over. “Sorry to intrude on the reunion,” Kirsten says, smiling happily. “But I have to meet my new family!” She squeals again. “Dahlia, were you surprised?”
“Surprised doesn’t begin to explain what I’m feeling right now.”
She grabs my arm and squeals again as she squeezes it. “Good. I’m so happy!”
I sigh as she clings onto my arm like a needy toddler. She’s lucky she’s so nice. It’s the only thing stopping me from pushing her down the stairs.
Mack shakes my father’s hand, and the sight of my new boss and father-in-law meeting my dad makes me want to light my hair on fire just to create some kind of distraction.
“Nice to meet you, Echo,” Mack says. “That’s such an interesting name. What does it mean?”
“It means when you yell and the sound repeats,” my father says, nodding.
My cheeks burn red. “I think Mr. McMillan knows what an echo is, Dad. I think he was asking why it’s your name.”
“Oh,” my father says, looking confused. “Once I was high on acid and my echo started talking back to me. It was incredible. A real life-changing event.”
“Your echo started talking to you?” Tyler asks. I shoot him a dirty look. I don’t want him encouraging my father like this.
My father nods. “I would say something, and my echo would respond.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t someone talking to you?” I ask, folding my arms over my chest as I glare at him. My heart is beating so rapidly in my chest that I’m worried everyone can see it thumping away in embarrassment.
My father tilts his head to the side as he thinks about it. “Maybe,” he says with a furrowed brow. “I was in a Walmart at the time.”
Our pathetic little group goes silent as we all marinate on my father’s stupidity for a few seconds.
Mack breaks the awkward silence. “Dahlia got a new Ferrari today,” he says, smiling at me.
“Really?” my father says, nodding like he’s impressed. “Your mother and I had sex on a Ferrari once.”
My chest tightens as my face, neck, and ears burn impossibly hot. No way he just said that. My heart is beating so fast that it’s going to stop working. I’m literally going to die of embarrassment.
“It wasn’t ours, though,” my mother clarifies in case anyone couldn’t have guessed that the woman wearing a shirt made out of a burlap sack owned a Ferrari. “We saw it in the parking lot of McDonald's.”
“All right,” I say, stepping into the circle to break up this little party. “Mack. Kirsten. Is there anything I can help you with, inside?”
Both of my parents are already wandering off to the buffet table, muttering something about having the munchies.
“We’re okay, dear,” Kirsten says, following my parents with one eye as they walk through the backyard. “The caterers are taking care of everything.”
After a few seconds of awkward silence, Mack and Kirsten wander off to talk to their guests, leaving Tyler and me alone.
I take a deep breath as I turn back to old Echo and Essence. The other guests are moving out of their way wherever they go, like the guests are afraid of catching my parents’ poorness.
My stomach hardens as my father says something to Walter Rosendale, the eighth richest man in the country.
I turn to Tyler and bury my face into his hard chest. “I can’t look,” I whisper.
He wraps his arms around me and rocks me back and forth, making me feel a tiny bit better. “Want to get out of here?” he whispers.
I nod. “If it’s anywhere closer than China, I’m not interested.”
“It’s not China,” he says with a smirk. “But it’s way cooler than here.”
“An active volcano would be cooler than here,” I say through gritted teeth.
Tyler laughs as he grabs my hand and guides me down the stairs. “Follow me. I know just the place.”
10
Dahlia
“What the hell is that?”
Tyler laughs as he looks up. “A treehouse. Haven’t you ever seen a treehouse before?”
“That’s not a treehouse,” I say, tilting my head back to look all the way up. “That’s bigger than the shack I grew up in.”
“You grew up in a shack?” he asks, looking at me funny.
“A shack would have been an improvement,” I say with a sigh. “I lived in a van for most of my, well, what normal people would call a childhood.”
“What do you call it?”
“Hell,” I say, taking a deep breath. “Why do you look surprised? You just met my parents.”
The huge treehouse is sitting in a large beautiful maple tree with wooden planks nailed into the thick trunk. It looks like it could be in a Norman Rockwell painting, if old Norm lived in the rich part of town.
Tyler helps me up first, which I initially think is nice until I’m halfway up and realize that he only let me go first so that he could see up my dress.
“Eyes on the tree,” I say, frowning as I stare down at him, “and not on the bush.”
He chuckles as he follows me up, keeping his eyes in front of him.
This treehouse is like something out of the Swiss Family Robinson after a home makeover. It has a freaking leather couch in it. “Are you kidding me?” I ask, looking around in shock. There are curtains over the windows, a rug on the floor, even a mini fridge that looks like it hasn’t been plugged in for a while.
Tyler laughs as he climbs in. “You didn’t have one of these growing up?” he asks with a smile.
“I lived in a tree for a week,” I say, popping my head into the other room. How many rooms does this thing have? “But it was because our van was in the garage for repairs.”
He’s staring at me in shock. “You’re kidding, right?”
I wish I was.
“It wasn’t so bad once the squirrels accepted me as one of their own,” I say, plopping down on the couch. I take a deep breath as Tyler sits beside me. “You don’t know how happy I am to be here.”
Tyler looks at me with a grin. “You’re telling me you weren’t enjoying the party full of my parent’s stuffy friends?”
“Oh, my God,” I say, cringing when I hear a tune being carried over with the nice summer breeze. That sound can only be one thing.
“What is that?” Tyler asks, tilting his head as he listens to it.
I drop my head into my hands. “A didgeridoo. My father is playing his freaking didgeridoo.”
“Didgerie-what now?”
“You may recognize it as the long wind instrument played by indigenous Australians, but I recognize it as pure embarrassment from my teenage years.”
“Wow,” Tyler says, trying not to laugh at my horrible misfortune. “I thought I had it bad growing up.”
“You had it bad growing up?” I say, staring at him in shock. “Yeah, it must have been so hard wearing thousand-dollar outfits and getting a brand-new Porsche on your sixteenth birthday.”
He gives me a tight smile. “Money isn’t everything,” he says. “You try living in a house with my parents and their insanely strict expectations. This community is all about what you have and who you are. I always wanted to get away from it all.”
I wave my arms, gesturing around to the treehouse. “You basically had an apartment to get away from it all.”
He laughs. “Not like that,” he says. “I always wanted to get away from these p
eople. I always wanted to live in a place without so many expectations—a place where people can just relax and be themselves without trying to step on the person beside them to get ahead.”
“It sounds like you would love Summerland,” I say. My stomach drops just thinking about my cute little town where everyone knows my name. “Quick, go visit it before your company closes it down.”
“I won’t close it down,” Tyler says.
“You might not be the one to make that decision,” I say. “It seems like your cousin Nick has already made it.”
Tyler grits his teeth together. “He’s not getting the position.”
“That’s not what he said.”
“That’s what I say.”
I don’t want to say it but I have to. “You’re going to need help. I can help you get the promotion.”
He looks at me in shock. “You want to work together?”
I take a deep breath as I sink back into the couch. “I want to keep the factory open, and it seems like helping you is the only way to do that.”
“Are you going to be able to pretend that you’re my loving wife?” he asks.
My heart starts to beat a little faster as I watch him. He looks so gorgeous in his fitted suit and with his hair gelled to the side like that. It still blows my mind that he was inside of me.
“It’s easy to pretend here in Vegas where you don’t know anybody,” he goes on. “But you’ll have to pretend when you get back home. Everyone at work, in town, your friends—they’ll all think we’re married.”
I try to hide my grin. I can’t wait to see the look on everyone’s face when I pull up in a shiny new Ferrari and walk out with this piece of man candy on my arm.
“I think I can handle that,” I say. But I’m not doing this for the looks on people’s faces. I’m doing this to save my town. “I’m all in. As long as you don’t try any husband and wife stuff behind closed doors, we’ll be fine.”
“What kind of husband and wife stuff?” he asks with a raised eyebrow.
I give him a look. “You know what I’m talking about.”