The Marriage Contract Read online

  The Marriage Contract

  by Kim Hartfield

  Published by Kim Hartfield

  Copyright © 2018 Kim Hartfield

  All Rights Reserved

  May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.

  Cover photo: © Deposit Photo

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  Prologue – Leah

  2006

  Poppy nudged me in the ribs, her foot tapping and eyes rolling. I tried to focus on the last few bites of macaroni casserole in front of me. Her mom, Theresa, cooked with heaps of cheese and piles of garlic, and I wanted to savor every last bit.

  Kick. Kick. Kick. Poppy’s foot beat against mine, distracting me from the conversation. I smiled at her father, who was telling an anecdote from his work. I hoped he didn’t realize I’d missed most of it already.

  “Le-ah…” Poppy whined under her breath.

  “Poppy, leave Leah alone,” Theresa said mildly. “That is, unless you’re finished, dear. You girls can go upstairs as soon as you’re both done. There’s no need for you to sit and listen to yet another of Gary’s stories.”

  “I’m almost done.” I shook my head at Leah, who was still fidgeting. “And I love your stories, Gary.” I swallowed the last bite, humming at the way the macaroni fell apart in my mouth. “Thank you so much for dinner, Theresa.”

  “You don’t have to say that every time, Leah.” Theresa’s eyes were kind.

  Poppy jumped up, pushing in her chair and leaving her plate and glass on the table. She was already at the kitchen door by the time she realized I was stacking hers with mine and bringing them to the sink. Since the casserole dish was empty, I brought that over, too.

  “You’re not seriously washing dishes,” she groaned. “My mom will do that.”

  “When she already cooked?” I turned on the tap.

  Poppy heaved a sigh, but she picked up the used napkins from the table and nudged me to move over so she could drop them in the garbage can under the sink. “You’re no fun, Leah.”

  “Obviously I am, or you wouldn’t have stayed friends with me for all these years.” I set the last glass in the drying rack.

  “Are we done now?” she asked.

  “Almost.” I grabbed the dish towel.

  Turning around from her seat, Theresa waved me off. “Don’t bother, dear. Like I always say, dishes dry themselves if you give them enough time. Go have some fun, already.”

  I hesitated, not wanting to seem ungrateful. These people were like my second family, which meant a lot since my real one wasn’t much of a family. My mom did her best, but as a single parent without a formal education, she had to work so much she was rarely around.

  On the other hand, I was dying to get upstairs and be alone with Poppy. She’d had choir practice after school, so we hadn’t spoken one-on-one since second period, and seven hours without talking to her was way too long.

  “Okay,” I told her mom. “Only if you’re sure, though. And if I didn’t tell you ten times already, that casserole was seriously delicious.”

  Upstairs, Poppy flopped down on her bed, her limbs sprawling every which way. Her sweater lifted, exposing an inch of nearly-flat stomach. I plopped myself next to her and stuck my finger in her belly button.

  “Hey!” she yelled.

  Exploding with laughter, I threw my arms across my stomach as she tried to do the same to me. I rolled away from her and she crouched beside me, tugging madly at the hem of my ancient Metallica sweater. Strands of my dyed jet-black hair floated into my face until I blew them out of my mouth.

  When Poppy saw she wasn’t getting anywhere, she held out her hand. “Truce?”

  “Truce.” I reached out to shake – then screeched as she yanked my top up and poked me in the navel. “Cheater!”

  “I can’t believe you fell for that,” she snorted.

  When our laughter finally died down, she switched on a CD without asking my permission. Justin Timberlake’s new one, of course. She’d been listening to it on repeat so much that I knew all the words. And I hated pop music.

  The room filled with the sounds of horrible vocals, and she lay beside and we stared at each other. “So?” I asked. “How’d it go with Calvin last night?”

  “Good,” she breathed, her eyes going dreamy.

  I ignored the twinge in my gut. “Well, what happened? I’ve been dying to know all day.”

  She snapped back to her usual self. “Didn’t seem like it. You were pretty keen on staying downstairs and chit-chatting with my boring-ass family, actually.”

  My face went hot. “My mom and I don’t exactly have family dinners, and when we do get to sit down together, we eat freezer meals. I never, ever want your parents to think I’m not grateful for them including me like this.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Sometimes I wondered if she did know. She loved her parents, but we were only seventeen, and at our age it was easy to take something you’d always had for granted.

  “You could come over every night of the week if you wanted,” she went on. “My parents wouldn’t mind, and I sure wouldn’t, either.”

  “I wouldn’t impose like that. They’d get sick of me.” What I kept to myself was that she also needed time to spend with her other friends, who didn’t understand why she hung out with me.

  She got along with just about everyone in our grade, and her closest friends other than me were the most popular girls in school. They thought I was a freak with my black hair and heavy eyeliner. For my part, while I didn’t have anything against them, I found them too ditzy and empty-headed to want to spend time with them.

  Poppy was ditzy, too, but that was different. She was funny and carefree and completely free of pretences. The other popular girls put up a front, always trying to look good and impress people. Poppy didn’t care what people thought. She was just her own unique and unadulterated self.

  We’d known each other since the day we were born – not quite literally, but we might as well have. We shared a birthday, so our moms had probably crossed paths in the hospital. They’d actually met in a breastfeeding class a few days later. They bonded over first-time motherhood and even discovered they lived near each other. And while they’d never totally meshed the way Poppy and I ended up doing, they were close enough to trade off on baby-sitting, so that Poppy and I were practically forced to become best friends.

  Now Poppy pouted. “I’d never get sick of you… but I guess I’ll have to stick with seeing you every day in calculus.”

  “You poor thing, having a free tutor.” I was a perpetually lazy student, but science and math came easily enough to me that I could help Poppy out, too. “Now tell me about Calvin.”

  “Well!” Poppy put her hands behind her head, grinning like the cat who ate the canary. “He wanted to pick me up, so he had to come in and meet my parents, which he wasn’t expecting, but he played along, and my dad gave him such a hard time.”

  “I bet.”

  “We went to the movies, and we were eating popcorn out of the same bag, so our hands just kind of brushed up against each other’s every once in a while. Like, I kept wondering if he was doing it by accident, but then halfway through the movie he put his hand on my knee, so…” She smirked.

  “Wow.” I told the funny feeling in the base of my stomach to go away. “Did he kiss you?”

  “Not on the lips.” She played with a strand of blonde hair. “There was a moment when he dropped me off when I thought he was going to. We were on my doorstep and he was staring at me with that look guys get, you know?”

  I didn’t know. “Sure.”

  “And he leaned in, and I got a little ner
vous, and he must’ve felt it too, because at the last second he swerved and went for my cheek instead.” Pursing her lips, she shrugged. “It was cute, at least.”

  “Cute’s what you look for in a guy?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She flipped onto her stomach, positioning a pillow under her torso. “What about you, anyway? When are you going to find a boyfriend?”

  I laughed uncomfortably. “Probably never. I don’t have much time, what with Sandwich Town four nights a week, and all the studying I clearly do.”

  “Hmph.” She eyed me. “You’d get a lot more male attention if you’d leave your hair brown and go easier on the eyeliner.”

  “Not going to happen.” I shoved her playfully. “And that’d be the wrong kind of attention, too.”

  “What do you mean?” she teased. “Do you want female attention, or something?”

  “Very funny,” I said. “No, I’ll probably stay single forever. If I ever do date, they’d better be a weirdo like me.”

  “You might be asking too much. I’m not sure if there’s a male version of you anywhere.” She frowned. “But you can’t just give up and say you’re going to stay single forever, though.”

  “I’m pretty sure I just did.”

  She flicked me on the shoulder. “That’s too pathetic to even say out loud. C’mon, you’ll meet someone.”

  “Probably not. But who needs a boyfriend, anyway? I like being alone.”

  “Don’t be such a downer.” She flicked me again, then poked me about eight times in a row. “If you’re not married by the time you’re thirty, I’ll marry you myself.”

  My heart fluttered. “Don’t be silly, Poppy.”

  “It’s legal in Massachusetts.”

  I turned over, facing away from her. “You’re being dumb. You’ll be married by then, anyway. Probably to Calvin, with a bunch of butt-ugly kids.”

  “Our kids would be adorable, thank you very much. But anyway…” She jumped off the bed and rifled through papers on her desk, coming back with a pen and a binder open to an empty page. “I’m really into this idea. Let’s write up a contract so we don’t forget.”

  “A contract? For marrying each other?” I raised an eyebrow. “I haven’t even agreed to this half-witted plan yet.”

  “Yet,” she repeated. “So you were going to agree. C’mon, you’re being a downer again.” She set her pen to the paper. “Today, October 15, 2006, we the undersigned declare that if we’re both still single at the age of thirty, we will marry each other. Signed, Poppy Barnes.” She scribbled her name with a flourish and held the binder out to me.

  I gave her a hard look. “This is really dumb, Poppy. Like, the dumbest plan you’ve ever come up with. Dumber than the time you started a petition to get Mrs. Harrison to take us on a field trip to Narnia in the second grade.”

  “Why’s it so dumb?” she asked innocently. “You and me, married. Can you imagine? We’re already best friends. We’d just be life partners as well.” She fluttered her eyelashes at me.

  “We’d have to live together,” I said. “You couldn’t even date guys, you know. Thirty isn’t even that old to be giving up on finding a husband. Are you sure you don’t want to make it forty or fifty instead?”

  “Nah. If I haven’t met my soulmate by the time I’m out of college, it’s not going to happen. I might as well just marry my bestie and enjoy my life.”

  “How about the fact that we’d have to have sex?” I asked. “With each other?”

  She hesitated. “We’d work around that.” Shoving the binder at me again, she gave me a puppy-dog look. “Now sign it already.”

  I took the binder and held it. “You do know this won’t be legally binding?”

  “I’m going to bind you to it.” She grinned. “Even if we somehow manage to lose touch, I’ll find you. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, if we’re single I’m tracking your ass down and marrying you.”

  I scrawled my name. “That’ll never happen.”

  Even if, in my heart of hearts, a tiny wordless part of me wished that it would.

  One – Poppy

  2019

  The TV droned in the background as I chopped potatoes and carrots for dinner. The news was as depressing as always. These channels only reported on the horrible things that happened in the world, murders and robberies and shootings.

  Usually I preferred more optimistic fare. Tonight it felt appropriate. I wasn’t in the best mood, given that I was cooking up a dinner for one.

  My girlfriend had moved out just over a month ago, and I still hadn’t gotten used to eating alone. I tried to eat with friends several nights a week, but no one had been free tonight, and with my parents a half-hour drive away, I’d thought it’d be faster to cook for myself.

  And it was faster, I thought as I glumly dropped the vegetables into boiling water. It was just a bit pathetic to make and eat a meal alone. Of course, I’d been spoiled growing up. Not everyone had a family who insisted on sitting down together every single night.

  Then I’d been in the dorms, and soon after that, I’d been with Marjorie. A few years’ break in between, and even then I’d had a friendly roommate. After that, there was Kerry for the better part of three years. Until last month.

  I shook my head, staring dully into the bubbling water. Things had been good with Kerry, for the most part. I hadn’t seen the break-up coming. All of a sudden, she’d dumped me to be with one of her coworkers, saying she felt more passion for her than she ever had for me. It was true that we’d always felt more friendly than romantic, but I’d thought that was a good thing, a sign of maturity in our relationship. In the end, it hadn’t been good enough for her.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” I said out loud. “I don’t need a girlfriend. I’m fine by myself.”

  I wasn’t convincing anyone. The lack of passion hadn’t made the break-up any easier – I guessed because I’d been used to the constant companionship. Kerry was a homebody like me, so when she was at work, she was with me. Until she wasn’t.

  I poked a carrot with the tip of a fork. It seemed tender, so I drained the vegetables and set them on a plate next to some chicken and rice. Simple, boring even, but it’d be filling and healthy.

  After setting a single place for myself, I grabbed the remote. The new flat-screen sat on the wall across from me – I’d bought it after the break-up. Kerry and I used to cuddle up and watch TV in the living room. Now I used this TV to keep the silence at bay.

  “… in the sixth murder in Grass Cove this year…” the reporter said, just before I jabbed at the remote. This was small-town Wyoming, and half those “murders” probably referred to the deaths of family pets. Anything would be better than that fear-mongering, aside from maybe the national news.

  I flipped channels to find something that’d capture my attention. Nothing good was on at this hour – all the good shows were only on Netflix these days, anyway. Not wanting to get up and get my laptop, I went back to the news. Ideally I’d find some current events I could talk about with my fourth-graders tomorrow. We’d been learning about the regions of the United States, so there should be something I could tie in.

  The screen had shifted from the newsroom to a reporter standing in a field next to what appeared to be a robotic dog. I screwed up my eyes, trying to figure out if I was interpreting that right. The thing was the size and shape of a greyhound, but with interlocking metal components rather than flesh and fur.

  “The SpotBot 3000 will soon be starting work with the FBI,” the reporter said. “This prototype may not bark like a real dog, but he does have other capabilities – like searching and rescuing. He uses cutting-edge heat-sensing technology to find people lost in the wilderness, or victims of train, boat, or airplane accidents.”

  He stepped aside, and a woman came forward to kneel and pet the “dog.” She was dressed casually, considering that she was on TV – skinny jeans and a blazer with elbow patches. There was something familiar about her, but with
the thick-framed black glasses she wore, I couldn’t tell where I might know her from.

  The reporter gestured toward the woman. “Meet SpotBot’s creator and founder of PupTech – Grass Cove’s own Leah Perry.”

  My breath caught in my throat. That couldn’t be my Leah… could it? This one had brown hair rather than the jet-black I remembered, and her style was more normal – no all-black clothes or metal-studded jewelry. She was a little heavier, too, her breasts and hips curvier.

  But it had to be her. How many Leah Perries were there in a town of 200,000? How many with the same eyes, the same smile? As she stood up on-screen, I became certain it was her, Leah, all grown up.

  “Tell us about creating SpotBot,” the reporter said. “Was he harder to train than the average dog?”

  Leah laughed, and I knew for sure it was her. “He took a few years longer to train than you might’ve expected. In fact, you could say I’ve been training him since I finished grad school and opened PupTech, which was six years ago.”

  I stared at the screen, my food going cold in front of me. A shot of pride burst through my heart. I’d always known Leah would be successful when science and math came so easily to her, but to see her now… she had a master’s degree in what, engineering? Robotics? And she’d founded her own start-up?

  She’d always hated to study, and sometimes I’d worried she wouldn’t even make it through college. And then there was her financial situation. Even though she’d worked at the sandwich shop to save up, I’d feared she wouldn’t go to college at all, until the day she’d excitedly told me she’d gotten several scholarships.

  Resting my chin in my hand, I gazed at the TV with affection. It was good to see Leah again, to know she was all right. I never would’ve thought we’d lose touch, but she and her mom had moved, and somehow with all the things going on in college, one or both of us hadn’t put in the effort to keep our friendship alive.

  “And does SpotBot ever pee on carpets?” the reporter asked.

  Leah laughed again. Back in the day, she would’ve rolled her eyes – or maybe not, because even though the question was cheesy, the pride she took in her robotic dog was written all over her face. People got cheesy when it came to their babies, as I knew from my own job.