Free And One Last Thing... by Molly Harper Page B

infomercial was interesting. I shared some blame in that. We had no connection. No dependence on each other, no real intimacy. We started dating in high school because we ran in the same circles and our parents approved. We got married because that was what you were supposed to do when you’d been dating for a while and were graduating college. It seemed like the next step and we couldn’t think of a better one.
    There were things I didn’t expect, a rush of longing when I smelled Tide detergent, a scent that would forever remind me of Mike’s shirts. Not having someone to rub my cold feet against under the covers. Someone to eat my pizza crusts, which I always left behind and Mike called the “pizza bones.” But I think these were signs that I needed a roommate, not Mike. Or maybe a neutered cat.
    Yes, Daddy drove Mama nuts with his constant need to be around his stupid adolescent college buddies. But reconnecting, nay, dwelling, on his past kept Daddy happy. And that made Mama happy.
    She compromised, she didn’t settle.
    ******
    I woke up the next morning to find that my car had been towed. Mike had removed my name from the title more than a year before and I just hadn’t noticed. When I called the county clerk’s office to try to order a copy of the title paperwork, I found that Mike had also managed to cut off my American Express, my Visa, and my MasterCard. I was still on the phone with MasterCard when Mama came into the kitchen wearing a bathrobe, staring in horror at the morning edition of the Singletree Gazette.
    She turned the front page toward me so I could read the headline, “Scorned Local Woman Sued for Scathing E-Mail.”
    “Oh… no,” I groaned, dropping the phone on its cradle.
    Reporter Danny Plum, whose byline hovered over my own personal nightmare, was an industrious little bastard. He’d found the bridal portrait we’d included with our wedding announcement years before in the newspaper archives. It was front and center, just under a smaller subhead reading “Widely Forwarded Anti-Adultery Missive Sparks Divorce, Community Debate.”
    Mama’s face was as white as the newsprint. “Baby, I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know he was writing it down. I’m so sorry.”
    I took the paper from her shaking hands. “Unable to return to her marital home, Mrs. Terwilliger is reportedly staying with her parents, rarely leaving the house except to consult her attorney, Samantha Shackleton.” I read aloud. “When contacted by the Gazette, Mrs. Terwilliger’s mother, Deb Vernon, insisted that many wronged wives would follow in her daughter’s footsteps, ‘if they thought of it.’
    “Everybody thinks Lacey’s gone crazy, but that’s not true.
    She knew what she was doing,’ Mrs. Vernon said in a phone interview. ‘She was just pushed too far. And yes, she overreacted a little bit. It happens to the best of us, but I don’t want to comment. Of course, if Mike didn’t want to be publicly embarrassed, he shouldn’t have run around town chasing some hussy like his pants were on fire … but I don’t want to comment. I just wish people would mind their own business. Really, I have nothing to say.”
    My mother cringed as I made a sound somewhere between a groan and call of a dying crane.
    “I declined comment! Declined!” she cried. “And he’s twisting what I did say all around! I’m going to strangle that little weasel reporter!”
    I picked up the ringing phone without thinking about who could be calling. Samantha’s voice, frustrated and weary, came through the receiver. “I know I didn’t specifically tell you not to have your mama defend you to the press, but I thought I made it clear that you needed to keep a low profile.”
    “Mama says she declined comment,” I told her, giving Mama an exasperated look.
    “Did she say ‘off the record’?” Samantha asked. “Those are the magic words. Unless she said, ‘off the record,’ anything she said, even in passing conversation