“Thirty-six?”
“My father was married five times.”
I wasn’t sure where she was going with this. “Well, he’s only got one marriage on my father.”
“. . . At the same time.”
It took me a moment for comprehension to set in. “He’s polygamous?”
“That little town I’m from in southern Utah is called Hilldale. It’s a polygamist colony.”
She looked into my eyes nervously. “I followed in my parents’ footsteps. I got married when I was eighteen. I’m the fourth wife of five.”
I had no idea what to say.
April looked frightened. After a couple minutes she said, “Please say something.”
“I don’t know how to respond to that.”
She reached across the table and took my hand. “Please don’t leave me.”
“I’m not . . . I just . . .” I exhaled. “Wow. That’s nothing I’ve ever encountered.” I looked at her. “Or imagined I’d encounter.” I sat there quietly processing. “You left him?”
She nodded. “We all did. At least four of us did.”
“What happened?”
“This will sound a little strange to you.” She hesitated. “Actually, probably a lot strange. John, my husband, is fifty-three. Two years ago the Elders of our church gave him another wife, Elizabeth. She was only seventeen. Elizabeth didn’t want to marry a fifty-three-year-old man. Especially since she had a boyfriend her same age. So, a couple days before John was to marry her, Elizabeth and her boyfriend ran away together. John was crushed. He felt so bad that after a few weeks the wives got together and told him he should go to Salt Lake and visit a polygamous family we knew with five daughters.
“He came back from Salt Lake with Lindsay, a beautiful little nineteen-year-old blonde. John was as giddy as a honeymooner. The next few weeks we barely saw him. He was always with her. She had him wrapped around her finger.
“When she realized how much control she had over him, she began to manipulate him. She became a little tyrant. She would scream at us and give us orders. Once, she got mad at me and pulled my hair. I went to John, but he wouldn’t even listen to me.
“The turning point came when John whited out his first wife’s name from their marriage certificate.”
“Whited out?”
“Because polygamous marriages aren’t recognized by the state, we only have one marriage certificate—the first wife. John’s first wife is named Andrea. She’s the same age he is. They kept that marriage certificate framed on the wall of their bedroom. John took some Wite-Out and painted over Andrea’s name, then wrote in Lindsay’s. That’s when Andrea threw them both out. So, for the next year, it was the four of us. We took care of each other.
“But a year ago John said he was taking the house back, so we all left. I came to Chicago because Ruth invited me to be her roommate. She left the colony a couple years earlier.”
“Ruth was a polygamist’s wife?”
April nodded.
“I never would have guessed that.”
“Sometimes when people leave a belief system, they go to the opposite extreme. It happens a lot.”
I put my head in my hands.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“I’m just mentally treading water,” I said. “I don’t know what to think about this.” After a minute I looked up at her. “How do you get a divorce when you were never legally married?”
“It has to be done with the church. But I left the church, so there’s no finality.”
“The Mormon church?”
She shook her head. “No. Mormons haven’t practiced polygamy for more than a century. I belong to a fundamentalist group.”
We both sat there, not knowing what to say. As the silence grew uncomfortable, tears began to fall down her cheeks again.
“I don’t blame you if you leave me. But please don’t. I love you.”
“I just need time to sort things out.”
She wiped her eyes with her napkin. “I understand.”
I stood. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“No,” she said. “You go. You need to think.”
“I’ll call you,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
She looked at me doubtfully. “Okay.”
I stopped at the front counter and paid the bill, then walked out the door alone. My mind was reeling. Finally, everything made sense. And nothing did.
CHAPTER
Nineteen
Sometimes our cruelest acts come not from meaning to do wrong but from not trying hard enough not to.
Joseph Jacobson’s Diary
I didn’t call April the next day. Or the next. I didn’t call her that whole week. It’s not that I wasn’t thinking about her—I couldn’t stop thinking about her—it’s just that I wasn’t sure what to say if I did. I didn’t even send the text messages I had written. It may sound strange coming from a professional copywriter, but I just couldn’t find the right words.