Fake Husband, Real Feelings

I moved to Silver Pass three years ago. I was twenty-five then. Now I'm twenty-eight, and I still live in the same rented cabin on the edge of town. It has a wood stove, a leaky faucet, and a view of the ridge. That's most of what you need to know about my house.

Here's how I ended up there. I finished college at twenty-two with a finance degree and no plan, and I spent three years doing temp work in a city office. Then my buddy Ling's cousin worked at a bank branch in the mountains and said they were hiring. I applied. I got it. I drove out in a Corolla with a dying alternator and never left.

The branch is small. Four tellers, two loan officers, one manager. Davis runs the place. He's fifty-five, been married thirty years, wears the same four sweaters on a rotating schedule. He hired me on the spot because I could do math and I didn't blink when he said the nearest strip club was ninety miles away.

So I do loans. Car loans, cabin loans, one memorable llama farm loan. It's quiet work. I like it.

The town itself is one main road, two grocery stores, and the Pinecone Lodge. The lodge is the whole economy, more or less. Skiers in winter, hikers in summer, and everybody drinking at the lodge bar by eight.

That's where I first saw her again. Nadine.

We went to college together. Same year, same dorm complex, a few shared classes. I had a crush on her from the second week of freshman year until graduation. I was twenty-two and she was twenty-one and I never said a word about it. She dated a guy named Trent the whole time. Big guy, lacrosse, always treated me like I was furniture. When we graduated she went one way and I went another, and it was over.

Or I thought it was. Then one Tuesday in October I walked into the lodge café for coffee and there she was. Twenty-seven now, ski instructor jacket, hair pulled back, laughing at something the guy behind the counter said.

I stood there like an idiot with my wallet open.

"Mason?" she said. "Mason Kilroy?"

"Yeah. Hi."

"Oh my god. What are you doing here?"

"I live here. Three years now. I work at the bank."

She came over and hugged me. I hugged back and tried not to make it weird. I probably made it weird.

We sat down. She had a shift at noon. We caught up fast. She'd broken up with Trent years ago, some controlling mess, and moved out to the valley to start over. Taught skiing. Liked it. The town fit her.

"I can't believe you're here," she said, stirring her coffee. "Of all the towns."

"Small world."

"Small town, you mean. Everyone's in everyone's business here. You'll learn." She grinned. "Actually, you've been here three years, so you already know."

She was right. I did know. And in about two weeks I was going to learn it even better.

The trouble started, as far as I could tell, with a policy. Byron runs the Pinecone Lodge. Thirty-two, fair guy, works hard, been in hospitality since he was twenty-one. But somewhere along the line somebody told him that long-term seasonal staff who were married stuck around better. So he'd quietly started preferring married instructors for the full-year contracts. Nobody loved the policy. It existed anyway.

I heard about it secondhand, thirdhand, the usual small-town way. Then Nadine showed up at the bank on a Thursday.

Not to bank, obviously. She leaned on my desk while I was pretending to review an application.

"Can I ask you something kind of insane?" she said.

"Those are usually the best questions."

"Are you seeing anyone?"

"No."

"Are you opposed to marriage?"

I laughed. Then I saw her face and stopped laughing. "Wait. What?"

"Okay. Here's the situation." She sat down in the client chair. "Byron is handing out the year-round contracts. Married staff get first pick. I've been teaching in this valley four years, I teach the best beginner clinics around, and at the Pinecone I'm still on the seasonal list. I asked him about it. He said, and I quote, married folks put down roots."

"That's a garbage policy."

"Tell me about it. I can't fight it and keep my job. So." She spread her hands. "I need a husband. Paperwork only. And you are the only single man in this town I actually trust."

I stared at her. My heart was doing something embarrassing, but that part I kept to myself.

"Nadine. You're asking me to marry you."

"On paper. Courthouse, certificate, done. We live separately. We tell people we're married, because this town talks, and in a year or two we quietly get it annulled or whatever. You get a friend with health insurance. I get a contract."

"Ling is going to lose her mind."

"Ling already knows. I talked to her first."

"You what?"

She grinned. "She said, and I quote again, oh thank god, I've been waiting for this."

I should have said no. Or at least slept on it. Instead I said, "What about the tax thing? Filing jointly is actually a decent deal."

Her whole face changed. "Wait, really?"

"There are real financial benefits. I'm a loan officer, I know these things."

"So is that a yes?"

"It's a yes!"

She came around the desk and hugged me again, and this one lasted longer, and I let it.

---

The courthouse was in the county seat, forty minutes down the valley. We went on a Wednesday morning in November. Nadine wore a green coat. I wore my one good suit. The clerk didn't even look up. The justice of the peace was a retired teacher named Mr. Sims who made us repeat the words and everything.

"Do you take this man," he said.

"I do," Nadine said, and then she snorted, because the whole thing was ridiculous, and I snorted too, and Mr. Sims waited us out as someone who had seen worse.

We signed. We paid the fee. We walked out married.

"Huh," Nadine said on the courthouse steps. "That was fast."

"That's marriage for you."

"Don't make jokes yet. You're stuck with me for the holidays. The staff party is in December and you're coming as my husband."

"I wouldn't miss it."

We got lunch after. She ordered pie and stole half of mine, which felt correct.

Now came the hard part, and the hard part was everyone we knew.

Ling found out before I could tell her properly, because Nadine had already told her, so that conversation was just Ling hugging me in the break room and saying "finally" over and over, which was confusing, since there was nothing to finally.

"Finally what?" I said.

"You know what."

"I don't. It's fake. We signed a piece of paper for her job."

Ling is thirty, married her college sweetheart at twenty-two, and has never once been wrong about anything in her own estimation. She patted my cheek.

"Sure, honey," she said.

I told Davis the following Monday, because I figured he'd hear it from someone at the lodge anyway. He took off his reading glasses, which was his serious gesture.

"You're married," he said.

"Yes!"

"Since Wednesday."

"Yes."

"To the ski instructor you've been asking about for three years."

"I have not been asking about her."

Davis put his glasses back on. "Mason, you've brought her up more times than the llama farm. Congratulations. Take Wednesday off for a honeymoon or whatever you two are doing."

"Nothing. We're doing nothing."

"Uh huh. Wednesdays are slow anyway. Take it."

Telling my parents was worse. I called my mom from the cabin that night. She was quiet for a solid ten seconds, which for her is a geological era.

"A courthouse wedding," she said. "Without us."

"It was fast and cheap. It's not really about the wedding."

"Who is she? That girl from college?"

"How do you remember Nadine?"

"Sweetheart, you called me every Sunday for four years and she came up in about three hundred of them."

I had no answer for that. My mom let the silence sit there, satisfied, and then asked real questions. Was I happy. Was she kind. Did she have family nearby. I answered what I could. Then she said the thing mothers say.

"Mason. I've been married thirty-five years. Nothing that starts as pretend stays pretend. You just tell me when it stops."

"She needs the marriage for her job, Mom. That's all."

"Okay. Tell Nadine I said hello, and that I expect a phone call from her by Christmas."

"She's going to think you're crazy."

"She's going to think I'm right. There's a difference."

I hung up and sat by the wood stove for a while. Three years of not thinking about her, and now I was married to her. Fake married. A piece of paper and a green coat and a pie I'd let her steal.

The plan was simple. Staff party in December, a few dinners, a year of pretending, then a clean annulment. Simple.

I want to note here that I genuinely believed that. I want to note it because of what happened later, in that same cabin, by that same stove. But that part comes later.

Nadine moved in that weekend. She had four years in the valley and somehow owned less than I did. Two duffel bags, a ski bag, a box of books, and a cereal bowl she'd had since college.

"That's it?" I said.

"I travel light."

"You have one bowl."

"I have one good bowl. There's a difference."

We'd agreed on the deal out loud first, before any of it. One year. Expenses split. Nobody sleeps in the same bed. Nobody catches feelings. She said that part twice, catching feelings, and I remember thinking she'd said it twice. I said nothing. I am an idiot, but I am a patient idiot.

She took the bedroom. I took the couch, which was fine in November and would be a war crime in February. The cabin is small. One bedroom, a kitchen, a living room, the wood stove, and a view of the ridge that I paid too much rent for and never regretted once.

The first week was weird. Not bad weird. Just two adults in our late twenties (well, she's twenty-seven, which she reminded me of constantly) learning where the other person kept the coffee.

"You use too many mugs," she said Tuesday morning. "You're one man. Why are there eight mugs in the sink?"

"I batch my dishwashing."

"That's not a system, that's a cry for help."

She was right, which was annoying. I washed the mugs. She fixed the leaky faucet in the bathroom with a wrench and about eleven seconds of work, and I had been living with that drip for two years like an animal.

"Did you just fix that?"

"It was driving me crazy since I toured the place. Which was once. When you were deciding if you'd marry me."

"That was a weird house tour."

"That was a weird proposal, Kilroy."

The tension was real though. I'm not going to act like it wasn't. Every time she came in cold from the mountain, cheeks red, hair everywhere, I had to remind my brain that we were coworkers in a fraud. Old crush, new address. Bad combination. I'd had a crush on her from the second week of freshman year until graduation, four solid years of pining after a woman who dated a lacrosse player the size of a vending machine, and apparently my heart hadn't gotten the memo that it was over. The memo had been lost in the mail for six years.

She caught me staring once. I played it off as looking at the window behind her, which fooled nobody, least of all me.

Then came the dinner. The Ling dinner.

Ling had been angling for it for two weeks. "You're married and I haven't met her. My husband makes a brisket. Come Sunday. That's not a question."

"Okay," I said.

"Okay! Bring Nadine. Wear your ring. Both of you."

"We have rings."

Ling paused. "You have rings, right? Please tell me you didn't get legally married without rings."

So we bought rings. At the general store, because Silver Pass has two grocery stores and no jewelry store, and the general store had a display case by the register with exactly two sizes. We stood there picking through it like it was a normal errand and not the strangest purchase of either of our lives.

"Silver or gold?" Nadine asked.

"Whatever you want."

"That's not helpful."

"You look good in everything, I'm not a designer," I said, and then heard myself. She looked at me. I looked at the case. She picked gold. We paid and left and neither of us mentioned what I'd said, which was the correct move, and also the coward's move.

Sunday came. Ling's house smelled like brisket (that's my one smell mention, I'm budgeting). Her husband Jake answered the door, apron on, and shook both our hands like we were new clients.

"Congratulations," he said. "Ling cried when she heard. She'll deny it."

"I will absolutely deny it," Ling said from the kitchen.

Dinner was the test. I hadn't thought of it that way until it started, and then it was very clearly a test. Ling and Jake sat across from us, and Ling is a nice person, but she is also a nice person running an interrogation.

"So how did this happen?" she said, serving the brisket. "Mason never mentioned you were together."

"We weren't," Nadine said smoothly. "We ran into each other at the lodge café in October. Hadn't seen each other since college. One thing led to another."

"What thing?"

"Nadine," I said.

"Fine. He's funny. I was bored. Next question."

Jake laughed. Ling did not. Ling leaned in. "And it went from coffee to courthouse in a month?"

"Time flies," Nadine said.

"When you know, you know," I added, and Jake raised his glass at me like I'd said something wise instead of