Not My Mary Jane

OR EIGHT MONTHS, RENAE THOUGHT HER HUSBAND HAD A DRUG PROBLEM. SHE HELD AN INTERVENTION. SHE MADE A POSTER BOARD. THE WHOLE CHURCH PRAYED.

Then she met Mary Jane. Wearing Renae's earrings. At the Git-N-Split.

Mary Jane isn't a drug. Mary Jane is a lash technician.

Renae Cutbirth has chaired the Solid Rock funeral committee for nineteen years, and she does not do a single thing halfway that can be done with a sign-up sheet. So when her husband Rusty started disappearing, bleeding money, and texting "gone to see Mary Jane," she did it right: the folding chairs, the forty-cup urn, the tri-fold display with section headers. Rusty wept. Rusty confessed. Rusty got saved.

And Rusty discovered the greatest alibi ever invented.

Because a man in "recovery" can vanish any night of the week. He can relapse, and be forgiven before he asks. He can stand up every Wednesday in the amber light and give a tearful testimony about his struggle, and four hundred people will lean in and lay hands on him and love him, and his wife will feel guilty for doubting. Rusty Cutbirth has never been high in his life. He's the most beloved addict in the county. And he's in love — not even with Mary Jane, exactly, but with being God's favorite comeback story.

There's just one problem with his beautiful lie. He told his girlfriend he was a widower. He told her Renae died.

So Renae stops grieving a marriage and starts running a campaign. She befriends the one man in town who can prove a miracle never happened — Gus Maples, who owns the dispensary and has the receipts, or rather, doesn't. She turns a church's compassion into the tightest surveillance in Oklahoma. And she books a lash appointment, under her own real name, in the chair of a woman who thinks she's dead, because some things you have to hear with your own ears, even with your eyes taped shut.

Her mama had a saying. You can lie to God all you want, honey. He's big. You can't lie to a sign-in sheet.

Rusty's about to find out that attendance is the one thing you can't fake.

A complete, laugh-out-loud Southern revenge comedy with a church-lady heroine you'll want to put in charge of your whole life, a husband who counterfeits his own redemption, a mistress who turns out to be another victim in better lashes, and a warm closed-door romance with the most honest man in town, who happens to sell weed. No cliffhanger, no cheating heroine, closed door. Every book in the OH NO HE DIDN'T Chronicles stands completely on its own.