Forty, Fabulous and Fae

by Melinda Chase

  Forty, Fabulous and…Fae?

  Midlife Mayhem Book One

  Melinda Chase

  Edited by

  Chris T. Edits

  Copyright © 2020 by Melinda Chase

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Midlife Mayhem Book One

  No one expects their happily-ever-after to end at forty—but here I am one Prince Charming short of a fairytale.

  Living back at Mom’s place with her and Gram is not how this ex district attorney intended to start the next chapter of her life, but I shouldn’t be surprised it’s where I ended up.

  You see, my family is cursed. Literally.

  At least that’s what both Gram and Mom claim. I’ve never given much thought to their ridiculous superstitions, but when three local patrons from my mom’s occult shop end up dead, even I’m a bit unnerved.

  So, I decide to dive right into the crazy headfirst. And what I thought would be the end of my journey…may only be the beginning.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

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  About the Author

  1

  “TAKE THE STUPID SHOES!” I screeched, while simultaneously launching my hardly worn pair of Louboutin’s straight at my husband’s head.

  Ex-husband. I needed to start remembering that tiny, yet very significant detail.

  To my absolute horror, Kenneth managed to duck, and narrowly avoided getting stabbed in the eye with the very sharp, stupidly irresponsible, and impossible to wear heel.

  If only I had learned to throw when I was a child. Maybe that moment would have turned out differently.

  But I guess I should back up a little bit.

  My name is Shannon McCarthy. A boring name for a boring woman. And even more boring? Here I am, barely forty, the victim of a male midlife crisis, newly divorced, and forced to move back home to Portland, Oregon. Well, not forced. But right now, Portland seemed like a much better choice than Boston, where news of my husband’s affair still littered the front pages of our local newspaper.

  Who would have thought my life would turn out like this?

  Not me, that’s for damn sure. When I married Kenneth, with his smooth tan skin and devilish good looks, I really thought that was it for me. This was the guy I’d spend the rest of my life with. We’d have two very high profile careers, me as a D.A., and him as a judge, live in a big fancy house with a purebred Golden Retriever who listened to our every single command, and drive shiny new sports cars, like a Lamborghini, to and from our high-paying jobs every day. It was the life every single Boston girl dreams of.

  And apparently, it was a life I no longer got to have. Not since Kenneth decided his pretty, young clerk was the place he should stick his junk, instead of being a respectable man and coming home to his wife.

  So, here we were. I was in the middle of packing up the home we’d bought ten years ago, the one we were supposed to grow old in, while Kenneth sat on his butt and complained about every single thing I tried to box up. Anything he had bought me during the fifteen years we’d been married was apparently just a reminder of how much he had “given” me over the years.

  As if I hadn’t given him anything, too. I was the one who’d worked my tiny little butt off to put him through law school when I was on a public defender’s salary, saving and pinching every penny I possibly could so that we didn’t go hungry while he attended Northeastern.

  “I should have sent you to Suffolk,” I growled at him. “At least then, I wouldn’t have wasted a hundred grand so you could be a corrupt judge.”

  “I am not a corrupt judge!” Kenneth hollered. “What part of this don’t you get?”

  “All of it!” I shrieked. “How could you throw away fifteen years of marriage for a fling? Fifteen years, Kenneth! We were building a life together. We were supposed to have—”

  “Have what, Shannon?” he demanded, stepping up into my personal space. Those deep brown eyes of his bore into my green ones with a fury I’d only seen him use on the worst criminals, the ones he absolutely loathed and could never be impartial to.

  I guessed I fell into that category now. The category of “People Kenneth Loathes.”

  “Have… it!” I sputtered as I attempted to articulate just what “it” was. But I couldn’t find the words. “It” was huge. “It" encompassed so much that I couldn’t possibly do it justice with a few shouted sentences.

  “Yeah,” Kenneth sneered. “‘It’ being the fancy house, the nice car, the dog.”

  Kenneth pointed an accusatory finger at Marley, our mutt. We weren’t exactly able to spring for the Golden Retriever six years before.

  “What’s wrong with that?” I demanded. “I wanted a nice life, a comfortable one. I wanted to be happy in my marriage, unlike every other woman in my family. Is that too much to ask?”

  Kenneth stopped. A brief flash of humanity leapt into his eyes, but then it was gone just as quickly. I almost wasn’t sure if it had actually been there in the first place.

  “Maybe it is,” he finally whispered, his eyes downcast. “Because by asking for it, you tried to mold me into something I’m not… Something I could never be for you.”

  “All I asked was for you to love me,” I murmured. Tears pricked my eyes, and I felt the brick wall I'd so carefully built in the last two weeks start to crumble and fall.

  “No, you didn’t.” He shook his head and adjusted his navy blue tie. “You asked me to be this monument of a husband—like I was some character in a storybook. This isn’t a story, Shan.”

  “It’s our story,” I insisted. I stepped up to him and cupped his soft, warm cheeks in my hands the way I always used to, begging him to look up at me.

  To love me.

  But he didn’t. Kenneth leaned into my touch one last time before he shoved my hands off of him and stepped back, teary eyed.

  “It’s your story,” he replied. “I have to go live my own story. And you’re just not in it. I’m sorry. Really.”

  And I could see that he was. He thought that his apology was enough to make me forget that after fifteen years, he’d come home one night and just asked me for a divorce. Just like that. No nonsense, no lead in.

  Kenneth started to walk down the giant, carpeted staircase, making a beeline for the door. I did my best to force myself to stay put. I couldn’t watch him leave this time.

  But my feet had other plans. Before I knew it, I was out of our enormous master bedroom and pressed up against the railing of our second floor landing.

  “Ken?” I called out, right as his hand went to open our massive oak front door.

  He froze, hand in the air, and didn’t turn back to me.

  “What?”

  “Why her?” I couldn’t help it. I needed to know what was so much better about this other woman. What made her worthy of breaking up a marriage?

  Kenneth sucked in a huge breath, and then sighed. He didn’t turn to look back at me when he spoke. I wasn’t sure if it was because he couldn’t bea
r to see the look on my face, or if he didn’t want me to see the look on his.

  “She and I want to live the same story, Shannon.”

  With that, the door slammed shut with a sound of such finality, I swear it could have happened in a Hitchcock movie.

  The scream that ripped from my throat was so feral and animalistic, it almost sounded like a banshee. Not that I believed in those sorts of things.

  When all of the sound had made its way out of me, and my vocal chords had been just about rubbed dry, I slowly turned back to the bedroom, where I had about fifteen boxes full of clothes to seal and pack.

  Except they were all done.

  Every single box that I had packed up was closed and sealed nicely with two layers of tape, as if some invisible assistant had come along and finished the task for me in mere moments.

  For a second, my heart stopped, and my heavy panting caught in my throat.

  “You’re imagining things, Shannon,” I muttered to myself. “You must have closed those boxes already.”

  But how could I have? The last thing I remembered doing was yanking a Louboutin out of an open box to throw at Kenneth. Even the box of shoes, though, was closed and sealed.

  Freaked out, I headed down to the kitchen to finish packing. The movers would be coming in the morning, and I’d be on a flight home the next afternoon.

  Home.

  I hadn’t been there for more than a brief, two-day visit in nearly ten years. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my mom and my Grams, or Grams’ best friend, Dina. I loved them more than words could say.

  It was their beliefs I didn’t love. All three of them were impossibly superstitious, and whenever I was around, I always felt like there was some big secret I was missing out on, some sort of major thing I just didn’t know.

  Which was crazy. They were my family, and I knew everything there was to know about them all.

  But still. My intuition always went haywire whenever I was in that house, the same one Mom had grown up in after her father had abandoned them.

  The same one I’d grown up in.

  Less than twenty-four hours after my final fight with Kenneth, I was in an Uber and on my way to the airport.

  And stuck in traffic.

  “Are you sure there’s no backroads you can take to get us there faster?” I asked the driver, a stout young man with fire engine red hair, the same color as mine. He had a South Boston accent, and drove with his golfing hat on backwards.

  “No, lady, sorry,” the guy shrugged. “Traffic’s real bad out today, huh?”

  “Sure is,” I sighed, and looked at my watched for the fifth time in as many minutes.

  I had half an hour before the gates closed, I missed my flight, and I was stuck in Boston for… who knew how long. I just needed to get out, to go home and see my family and make some sort of attempt to reconnect with life itself. Figure out my next act.

  Without Kenneth.

  The traffic didn’t improve, even by a smidgeon. I was late to the airport, and by the time I made it through security, I was sweaty and anxious as I sprinted through the terminal.

  Just as I got up to my gate, I saw those big white doors start to close.

  “No, wait!” I screamed, so loudly I turned a plethora of heads. The attendant either didn’t hear me or didn’t care, because those doors closed all the same.

  “I… have… a ticket… for this flight,” I gasped at the cranky old flight attendant manning the door. “I need to get on.”

  She looked up, appraised me with dark hazel eyes, and then shook her head with absolutely no remorse.

  “Sorry,” she shrugged. “Can’t help ya. Get here earlier next time, like everyone else.”

  “No, look, you don’t understand,” I wailed. I could already feel it all coming down on top of me, revving up for a massive breakdown. The cheating, the divorce, the move, the pre-mid-life crisis I was about to have. “I’m getting a divorce, okay? Because my cheating ex-husband has some grand idea that he’s going to go live a story, whatever that means. But he’s not just living a story. Oh, no. He is living it with someone else. The man cheated on me and then had the gall to blame it on this insane need to ‘live my own story.’ What does that even mean? Do you know? Because I don’t. I just… don’t. So anyways, now I’m here, trying to get on this flight to go home and see my Mom and my Grams—who I haven’t seen since Christmas, mind you. I am a terrible daughter, I know, save it. My ex used to tell me that all the time. He also said I was a terrible spouse, but he’s the one who cheated, so you tell me who got the last word there, okay? All I’m really saying is that I need, and I mean need, to get on this flight and get the hell out of this city before the whole thing falls down and suffocates me. So is that too much to ask, for you to open those doors and let me get on my flight so I don’t suffocate?”

  Yeah.

  It wasn’t until after I’d finished, and felt that sort of out of breath panic a person feels after they’ve acted like a total idiot, that I realized I’d pretty much just dumped my entire life story on a total stranger.

  And an entire airport terminal.

  The stewardess, though, looked wholly unimpressed and unamused with my story. She just shook her head and sighed.

  “Go back to customer service and they’ll get you on the next flight,” she informed me. “Have a good day.”

  She glanced back down at whatever stupid paper was on her desk, and that was when I lost it.

  “Listen to me!” I hissed, crouching down so I could meet her eyes head on. “You need to let me on that flight. Now.”

  All of a sudden, the woman’s hazel eyes went blank, kind of like a person’s does in an overacted TV scene where they’re supposed to be hypnotized. She stared at me, and this scary smile twitched the corner of her lips, but didn’t go all the way, and sure as hell didn’t meet her eyes.

  “Okay, you can get on this flight,” she said robotically, and then went to open the doors as if she was a puppet on a string.

  I didn’t even have time to question the strange oddity. I just nodded my thanks and rushed past her to get on that plane.

  2

  The flight was long. Mostly because I hated flying. Of course, one time I’d gone all the way from Boston to Australia, and made it out alive. I hadn’t been too sure I’d step foot in Sydney, though, since the flight was so full of turbulence all I could do was replay the opening scene of Lost over and over and over in my mind.

  I think it’s safe to say I’m a bit of a wimp when it comes to planes. But, hey, a girl’s allowed to have one fear, right? And since there was absolutely nothing else in the world that could possibly scare me, I allowed myself to panic whenever my plane hit a little pocket of air and shook like we were in the middle of freaking Pompeii.

  I was still the first one to step off that flight, though. I pretty much rushed right to the front the moment we were allowed to unbuckle our seatbelts, carry on in hand. The flight attendants tried to tell me to sit back down but, once again, they seemed to listen to me. Who knew all it took to get your way was a bit of eye contact and some desperation fueled by an emotional breakdown?

  My sudden powers of persuasion were notable, but I didn’t have the energy or time to decipher why, because the plane had rolled up to the gate at that point, and I really wanted off.

  And I needed to pee. Airplane bathrooms were not my favorite place in the world.

  I dashed off the plane, went to the restroom, and then headed toward the parking lot, where my mom was supposed to meet me.

  As long as she wasn’t late. Which was, to be completely honest, an absolute rarity. Sometimes I wondered if I was secretly adopted, since I had this insatiable need to be everywhere at least five minutes early. Had it not been for the classic McCarthy red hair and green eyes, I would have already tried to search out some long lost birth parents.

  See, the thing is, I’m nothing like Mom or Grams. In fact, I’m just about as opposite from them as a girl could possibly get. W
hereas the women in my family tended to be a bit frazzled, always late, and sometimes forgot their heads were on their shoulders, I was a Type A, completely neurotic, perfectionist.

  We butted heads a lot growing up. We butted heads even more when I went off to law school with grand ideas of helping people and making a lot of money. Grams and Mom see very little value in money. They would have preferred I’d stayed home, gone to the University of Oregon, and helped them run their tiny little occult shop on Fourth Street.

  But I’d wanted no part in that. Magic doesn’t exist, and I sure as hell didn’t want to peddle falsities to the poor tourists. Mom and Grams didn’t see it that way, of course. In their minds, crystals and herbs were full of mystical energy and all sorts of magical elements.

  But our deviant beliefs weren’t even the worst of it. No, that came when I met Kenneth. The thing is, Mom and Grams believed there was some sort of curse on our family. The men never stuck around, or they were absolutely worthless, or they died. And, admittedly, when I looked at our family history as it pertained to love and marriage, we didn’t have the best track record. Grams grew up with her mom, aunt, and cousin—all women, no men. Grams’ dad had run out on them, while her uncle had been killed. Even her aunt’s son had disappeared mysteriously. And when she’d come to Portland, something similar had happened to her.

  I wasn’t too clear on the details, though. The guy may have run out, or been killed, or, well, never existed for all I knew.

  And then there was the story of my own father. A flighty hippie who would have rather smoked pot all day than raised a baby.