romantic comedies had showed up at their kids’ holiday program demanding that Michael come out and leave his family and be with her. Humiliated in front of the other parents, Jacqueline had demanded Michael have the woman removed from their school by the police and that he take out a restraining order. Jacqueline was uncertain at that point if they could ever work things out, but somehow she said they did.
That’s when I learned about the Road Code that some of the basketball wives and their husbands adopt. This rule essentially meant that what happened on the road stayed on the road, and that part of their lives never entered into the family home. No phone calls, text messages, accidental pregnancies, no STDs, no gossip on the blogs, and absolutely no falling in love. When the players were home with their families, they devoted their attention to their wives and kids. Some wives, she told me, had even gone as far as to create legal agreements that triggered steep financial penalties if the Road Code was broken. I told Jacqueline I didn’t think I could live like that and knowingly share my man with ot her women.
“First of all, you’re not sharing your man,” Jacqueline told me. “You’re protecting your family. If you wanted a faithful husband, you should have married Joe Postal Worker instead of a fine-ass basketball player worth millions of dollars. That man’s walking around with a target on his back, and these scandalous chicks, who are throwing panties at him left and right, will stop at nothing to get him. And because he’s a man who thinks with the wrong head, sometimes he’s going to slip up. It’s just sex with them, and it doesn’t have to mean anything more. Your husband loves you, but at the end of the day, he’s a man—and being a man who’s a professional athlete takes it to a whole n ew level.”
I didn’t know if I could accept the Code and that Kareem could be the one facilitating these hookups as they traveled around the country. Marcus and I continued to go to counseling and meet with our pastor to discuss our problems. We took a vacation to Fiji, and things seemed to get better. I saw that Marcus was really trying and he was sorry he had hurt me. But last year I started to get that nagging feeling again that something was going on. The blogs were littered with pics of him at nightclubs while on the road, and there were always groups of women hanging in the background. He always reassured me that nothing was going on and that the women were just hoping to catch the eye of one of the singl e players.
Yeah, right. How dumb do I look? I wanted to s ay to him.
I managed to sneak a look at his cell phone again but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I told Jacqueline about my suspicions. That’s when she told me that Marcus likely had a sec ond phone.
“After they get caught the first time, that’s what they do,” she said, chuckling. “They’ll get a second phone and only take it out when they are outside the home or completely away from you. He might keep it in his car, in a bag, or even have a friend or his agent carry it. If you happen to come around when he has it on him, he’ll pass it off to one of his boys or Kareem. Part of the Road Code is that you never have to see the calls or text messages. He’ll never put it in your face, so maybe he’s living by the Code and you don’t even know it.”
I thought about confronting Marcus but couldn’t bring myself to hear the truth. I buried my anger and focused on my charity work with the Wives Association and raising our son while Marcus burned up the courts and took his team to the play-offs. New endorsement offers came in, and his star was burning brighter than ever. A nasty divorce could possibly put that all in jeopardy. And as Jacqueline pointed out, half that money was mine, so I needed to protect it in case at some point I decided to leave.
Then the dead cheerleader turned up in the desert, and everythin g