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  ALL MY EXES LIVE IN TEXAS

  by

  AIMEE GILCHRIST

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  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright © 2020 by Aimee Gilchrist

  Gemma Halliday Publishing

  http://www.gemmahallidaypublishing.com

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  "No, look, Helen. Like this." Marian Depew held up her blanket to me, mild exasperation ringing in her normally placid voice. Her hands flew, blue metal knitting needles clanking. The sound of the endless Texas spring rain belting my metal roof almost drowned out her soft voice. She was always that quiet, as much as she was always calm. She and I were not of a kind. That was for sure.

  I held up my contribution, which was still nothing but a lumpy mess that in no way resembled a blanket yet. Or likely, ever. My exasperation was much more obvious. "Okay, so wait. I purl eighteen, knit eighteen?"

  Marian sighed. "No, remember it's knit thirteen, purl eight, knit eighteen, purl eight, knit thirteen."

  She'd already told me multiple times, but I had trouble even remembering the difference between knitting and purling, let alone the pattern I was supposed to follow.

  She was trying to be helpful to the poor, incompetent foreigner, for whom the grasp of knitting was a faraway dream. Except knitting was something I'd never wanted to do. I didn't even want to do it now. However, someone, probably the local mayor, Aodhagan MacFarley, had promised the closest hospital fifty knitted throws by the end of the year from the Birdwell, Texas populace, of which I was now a part. That meant by way of having two X chromosomes and planting my feet in Birdwell, I was expected to help produce these blankets.

  I threw the plastic needles I held onto my lap, resorting to a bad "your mom" joke in my frustration. "Your mom knits thirteen, purls eight."

  The slightest mar of confusion touched Marian's perfect porcelain doll features. "Actually, my mother doesn't do cable knits."

  Pulling in a deep breath, I didn't bother to apologize for lashing out at Marian since she hadn't even noticed my anger. I'd done a lot of growing in quiet, rural Birdwell in the last nearly a year, but not every hint of my negative self had been squirreled away by my newfound Zen. People who had known me before might have been surprised by how I'd changed, but it was likely the population of Birdwell still wasn't sure what to make of me.

  "Can't I just buy some blankets?"

  Marian pulled in another hard breath. From serene Marian, that was tantamount to throwing up her arms in displeasure. "The point is to make them, Helen. If we buy them, it just doesn't have quite the same impact."

  I gave that some thought. I was a true crime author, not Martha Stewart. "Can I just pay you to make them?"

  Marian's expression didn't give a lot away. Mostly because she was the strangest looking person I'd ever met. Flawlessly gorgeous, with perfect porcelain skin, dainty bow lips, and huge blue eyes, Marian was a living doll. Not in the good way. She was a walking poster for the uncanny valley. She almost never blinked, and her face moved less than my mom's after her last round of Botox.

  She shouldn't have been that surprised by my lack of domestic perfection. Six months ago, I was still trying to order delivery to my house, which had been in the process of being built at that time. When the five hundredth store refused to deliver to Birdwell, I just learned to give up and rely solely on Amazon and ingenuity. I was a true crime writer and not a domestic goddess. I could barely cook at all. I didn't clean, and I wasn't organized. I couldn't sew, bake, scrapbook, or apparently knit. But I was willing to give it the old college try anyway. Or pay someone else, at any rate.

  Marian looked completely out of place in my ultra-modern home, built for the express purpose of selling. My Aunt Penny's house had once stood on this land, until she'd been murdered and the plot had been left to me. I'd had the old house razed and this new one built in its place with hopes of generating enough money to help revive Birdwell's failing economy. Because I'd made it clear that improvement of Birdwell's situation was my current mission, the local Birdwell Ladies' Improvement Society felt it was completely logical to include me without asking and offer up my house as a meeting place, also without asking.

  Since I didn't actually want to go to their houses, it was okay I supposed. It wasn't like they were the only ones anyway. People from Bible study groups to half a dozen backyard mechanics with car manuals trying to suss out a difficult problem volunteered my house as meeting central. Sometimes the Birdwell Ladies' Improvement Society contained as many as fifteen or sixteen women, which was probably half the female population of Birdwell who weren't octogenarians. It probably made more sense to have them here than Aodhagan's, as I was actually a lady…ish. But Aodhagan was much less of a misanthrope than I was.

  I heard the front door open without a knock, and for a moment I freaked, thinking that it was either the police or a criminal. But then I remembered that I had been in Birdwell for eight months and I wasn't in Manhattan anymore. I'd be unreasonably happy to see the police, given who "the police" was in Birdwell, which was an issue all on its own, and the only crimes around here were usually petty. Mostly of the fighting drunk variety, though occasionally the more creative citizens liked to mix it up with some good old-fashioned bashing people with half-thawed turkeys or shooting buckshot at people who annoyed them, just to get their point across, not to actually hurt anyone.

  It was probably someone finally arriving to the Ladies' Improvement Society who was running exceptionally late. Rural Texas time didn't turn quite like anywhere else. It was perfectly acceptable to be two hours late to an engagement if you were busy picking watermelons but totally unacceptable to be ten minutes late to church. I barely glanced up at the noise and then returned to hating my blanket with a white-hot intensity.

  Within seconds the racket drew my attention back in time to see six total strangers standing in my living room. They clustered together like some kind of sci-fi show about monster hunting in which Marian and I were a big threat. Only one woman dared to separate herself from the flock, stepping dramatically into the middle of the room and glancing around with purpose.

  "We'll take it," she
said, her voice theatrically low and throaty.

  Marian, for once in our entire acquaintance, actually voiced what I was thinking. "Who are you?"

  I had never seen even one of these people in my entire life, but one thing was very clear. They were not from Birdwell. People in Birdwell, bless their crazy little hearts, didn't wear private labels, get their hair cut at Elizabeth Arden, or drive Cadillacs like the ones started by the key in the woman's hand.

  It was the Cadillac that finally galvanized me into action. I'd been trying to sell the house for months. It was a hopeless battle around here, though. Birdwell was a dump of a town in West Texas with a population of 562 people—563 if you counted me, which I wouldn't. There wasn't anyone as far as the eye could see who could shell out the kind of cash I was asking for the house. It looked like these guys could, though.

  "I'm sorry, you'll take what?" I was hoping they meant the house, but who knew. Last week, I'd come out of my house early one morning to discover a giant papier-mâché pig on my lawn. Why? Who knew? These people made their own rules. If even one of these guys was a native Birdwellian, we might not be talking about the same thing at all.

  The woman who was clearly the leader of this group waved one skeletal hand. She was taller than I was and clad in black from head to toe, except for her blood red nails and lipstick. She was pretty in a wildly emaciated kind of way and would be called glamorous by jealous friends with envy.

  "The house. We'll take it."

  I looked her over suspiciously and repeated Marian's question. "Who are you?"

  "Oh." She waived the question away as though it had no meaning. "I'm Vi Crowe. This is my husband, Carl." She gestured in the direction of an older man who looked like he desperately wanted to be JR from Dallas. The group spread like the Red Sea to allow him forward. "This is Carl's son, James."

  James Crowe was incredibly handsome, and clearly he knew it. He eyed every woman in the room, smiling cheekily. It was obvious to me that he knew what he had and he wasn't afraid to use it to get what he wanted. Probably in his late twenties, or maybe his early thirties, James wore a high dollar suit, extremely polished shoes, and his brown hair was perfect, nary a strand out of place. He met my eyes and flashed me a boyish grin.

  He was wasting his time with me. I didn't date. Not this guy and not anyone else. Even people who actually tempted me, like a certain mayor/sheriff/answer man. I gave him a polite, vacant smile and turned back to the group.

  "These are Carl's and my sons." Vi Crowe eyed her two teenage sons with clear adoration. "Apollo and Aries."

  Both boys were unattractive—there was no other way of phrasing it—insanely thin with hair so pale and fine it bordered on white. Somehow their ridiculously pretentious names didn't surprise me, considering their parents. The older one was maybe sixteen or seventeen and the younger more like fourteen or even as young as twelve. Greek God One had hair hanging in his almost feminine face, allowed to grow to his shoulders. His ratty jeans, holey white T-shirt, and blue flannel made him look like he was channeling the spirit of Kurt Cobain. He had a poorly rendered tattoo of some kind of big cat on the inside of his arm. I hoped he hadn't paid too much for it, since if he turned his arm just right it looked almost exactly like Hello Kitty, sans bow.

  Greek God Two favored more of an adolescent goat look, with both sides of his hair curving up around his face. It was one of those bizarre fashion choices that most of us make as young teens, and I had no idea why someone hadn't said something to him and done him the kindness of letting him know that his hair looked like a giant handlebar mustache perched atop his head. His pants were so loose they were barely clinging to the visible impressions of his hip bones jutting through the cloth. I didn't think he was trying to sag. It just seemed unlikely he could keep his pants up. Both of them were nearly as tall as I was, despite their young age, and I was not short. For a woman or otherwise. I was nearly six feet and probably an even six with my high blonde ponytail and kitten heels.

  Neither one paid any attention to Marian or me. God One was on his phone, and God Two was flipping through an iPad with intent.

  "And this is Leslie Cooper-Crowe. She's our Human Resources manager."

  Leslie Cooper-Crowe was a woman of around forty, wearing a suit so stiff it easily could have been made from metal. She walked stiffly too, as though she was also a fan of metal underwear. If she knew anything at all about actual relationships with humans, I would have been very much surprised, which suggested she was, perhaps, very bad at her job.

  She nodded at me, her tight brunette bun not even moving a hint as she barely glanced my way over the tip of her nose. "How do you do?" she asked in the same pretentious upper-crust English accent that I associated with the BBC. She even sounded like she was truly asking, "My, aren't you trashy?"

  I didn't know Vi, but there was something about her that immediately put me on edge. I knew plenty of women like her though. Women of an age who were beginning to resort to plastic surgery and medicine to give them what nature was no longer providing. My mother and all of her cohorts were the same.

  "Okay, I'm Helen Harding. What are you doing here?"

  "We're the owners and upper management team of Crowe Appliances. We've found a property just out of town and plan to build a plant there," Vi Crowe told me, just a hint of smug superiority telling me that she was going to have a savior complex about the result of giving Birdwell jobs.

  Well, that was…news. Probably good news. I just wasn't sure about the subtleties of such a large endeavor. Probably it was good for Birdwell, but I couldn't be entirely sure they weren't getting screwed. I'd definitely have to bring Aodhagan in on this one. And maybe the local lawyer, Jamie. In reality, this sort of thing was exactly my province here in Birdwell, so maybe it was lucky they'd come here first.

  "Why…Birdwell?" I couldn't help but ask. This place had a piece of my heart, despite my better judgment, but it was not the sort of place one willingly decided to build a life. It was more like falling into a bear trap and deciding it wasn't too uncomfortable.

  "My father had rental properties here when I was a girl. We were looking for an area in West Texas where we could maximize property and profits while still contributing to the local economy."

  Vi's answer sounded rehearsed, and the others hadn't spoken at all.

  "What is it you make again?" I asked.

  Carl's attention finally turned my way. He was much older than his wife, and that wasn't just the Botox speaking. He was probably in his mid-sixties and was vaguely overweight with a shock of white hair. His eyes were dark and rimmed with red, like someone who drank too much.

  He pulled a cigar from his jacket pocket and shoved it into his mouth but didn't light it with the lighter in his other hand. If he had, I would have pulled it out and thrown it away. I noticed his hands were stained with nicotine. On and off, I had been a smoker. The last time was my first three months in Birdwell, when the stress was more than I could handle without psychiatric drugs, alcohol, or nicotine. Since cigarettes were my only option at the time, I'd smoked a couple times a day. It hadn't taken much to stop again after my first time stopping in my early twenties, but even at my highest usage in my late teens, I'd never smoked anything as gross as a single cigar.

  Sensing my disapproval, he scowled at me and returned his lighter to his pocket. "Small appliances, missy. The only truly beautiful thing on earth."

  My eyebrows shot up, but I said nothing. I was all for esoteric interests, but the only beautiful thing was stretching it a bit. To my surprise, I heard Marian giggle. She had little in the way of a sense of humor, and it was kind of shocking that this was what set it off, though I would grant the statement was absurd.

  As if they'd suddenly received a message from the mother ship, the group broke up and spread around my living areas, an open warren of rooms, separated only by half walls and geometric screens. It was violating, and now that someone interested in the house was here, I was feeling a little proprietary. Car
l's son James and Vi crossed around the koi pond in the middle of the great room and headed for the floating fireplace. Their heads cocked to the right in unison as they took in the three pictures I kept on my mantle. One was a favorite, a picture of my aunt Penny, who had owned this property, and me when I was a child. There was a picture of Penny's old house that had once stood here. The last was a picture of Aodhagan MacFarley and me.

  My relationship with Aodhagan was complicated. And yet, it was simple. I made no compunctions about admitting that Aodhagan was my best friend, in Birdwell or anywhere else. It was everything after that where it got all muddled. Every Friday night, Aodhagan and I broke out a single beer and sat on his front porch swing, telling each other about our weeks, which were largely boring. However, it was one of my favorite moments of every week.

  One Friday, just a few months before, we'd actually managed to fall asleep on the swing, curled into each other, somehow able to stay in sweet slumber despite the subzero weather. Marian had come upon us that way and snapped the picture. Both of us were pale, eyes closed, so cold our skin was nearly translucent. It honestly looked like we'd simply crawled onto the swing and died of exposure. The picture cracked me up. But I wasn't a fan of James pulling the picture down off the mantle.

  "Is this your boyfriend?"

  Vi cocked her head to the side and pulled it from James's hands, an almost feline smile pulling up the edges of her red-painted mouth when she took it in. I wasn't sure exactly what was so great, but she was definitely pleased.

  I snatched the frame back, ignoring Vi's obvious displeasure, and returned it to its spot. I didn't like the question. It felt too personal, even though it probably wasn't. In reality, I hadn't been on a date in nearly a year. Not since my fourth, and forever final, fiancé had been arrested in his apartment for making time with the underage honeys. The closest I came to dating was hanging out with Aodhagan, and I refused to view our time together that way because I was no longer dating. Ever. Even gorgeous men with giant brains, and compellingly persuasive dimples.