Free A Circle of Wives by Alice Laplante

to check,” I say.
    “It never hurts to be thorough,” Jake agrees as I take my leave.

13
MJ
    OF COURSE I REGRETTED SPEAKING to that reporter the minute I hung up the phone. But something puzzled me. I didn’t blab that much, drunk as I was. And that reporter definitely had information I didn’t give her.
    I never would have figured that the story would get as much attention as it did. And how that would lead to other reports, to TV and radio segments about my situation, to television vans with satellite receivers on their roofs congregating outside my door. As my grandma would say, well butter my butt and call it a biscuit. Because the circus that followed! Reporters calling so fast and in such volume that I’d answer the phone (that was when I was still answering it) and before I could say hello I’d hear the beep that signaled another call trying to get through. I eventually unplugged the phone from the wall.
    But today my cell phone started ringing, and only my closest friends know that number. Someone has betrayed me. I turn it off and go into the garden. To weed is to close my mind to anything else. Kneeling in the dirt among the lavender, surrounded by the twelve-foot fence that safeguarded our privacy, I’m safe. I sit back on my heels and breathe in deeply, the way I’ve learned in my relaxation tapes. Breathe in. Breathe out. Again. Again. After an hour of alternately doing my breathing exercises and pulling out the crabgrass that has been accumulating, my heartbeat has slowed and I can think clearly again.
    I go back into the house to get a drink of water. I’m worried about the state of my Hummingbird Coyote Mint plants (Monardella macrantha), they are showing brown spots on their leaves and the bright red blossoms are drooping. I wash the dirt from my hands in the kitchen sink, and without thinking, move to the front door upon hearing a knock. I open it (stupidly).
    Pandemonium. People leaping from cars and running toward me, camera lights flashing, yelling for statements. When did you know, MJ? And, How are you taking it? I slam the door quickly. Still, they keep coming. At first it’s just the local channels. KGO, KTVU. Then CNN and the national news teams from CBS and NBC. I go to the AT&T store and change my cell phone number, but they somehow sniff that out. The story apparently has legs. Every entertainment and gossip rag runs with it, keeps publishing follow-up articles, digs up all sorts of things I wouldn’t have thought anyone would remember. My sneaking out on the rent of the apartment on Pine Street in San Francisco back in the 1980s when the boys were small and I needed a clean slate to start over. Which I did, in Santa Cruz, living in a tiny box of a house that had obviously once been someone’s summer vacation home scraped together using two-by-fours and plywood. The reporters find that part of my life, too, including getting busted for growing and selling weed in the early nineties, for which I had to do community service. Well, shit , I say out loud when I hear that on the radio. I was just trying to make a living.
    Naturally the reporters find out where I work, and interview my co-workers who anonymously and predictably comment on my clothing and hair and general state of disarray. No one disparages the quality of my accounting work, that’s the one good thing. The bad thing is seeing John, and by extension, myself, made the butt of jokes on David Letterman and Jay Leno. Do you know the punishment for three wives? Three mothers-in-law! And, I take care of all my wives. Isn’t that big of me (bigamy)? And, Why did the polygamist cross the road? To get to the other bride. DJs speculate on John’s sex life on crude radio shows. One newspaper prints that John had to eat three turkey dinners on Thanksgiving and Christmas. That is nonsense. Or is it? John always worked Christmas, or so he told me, so we had our dinner early—at 1 PM , so he could go into the hospital. But now that I