“I don’t know who told you that,” Annette snipped, “but you’re not allowed to hang out with them anymore.” She swiveled back toward the window just in time to see another woman rap on Harriett Osborne’s front door. Annette gasped and pressed her forehead to the glass. “Oh my God, I think that woman works for your dad.” She remembered the woman from the Halloween party at her husband’s dental practice. He’d forced his oral hygienists to dress as the backup singers from “Addicted to Love,” a video which none of them were old enough to remember.
“Is it the lady with the great boobs or the one with the sweet ass?” the daughter inquired.
“Excuse me?” Annette glanced over her shoulder and saw an alien’s head explode on the screen. “We don’t talk about other women like that.”
“Really? Then tell your revolting husband. That’s how he refers to his ‘girls’ when his friends are around.”
Annette felt nauseous. Truth was, she’d been nauseous for years. “My revolting husband happens to be your father.”
“Yeah, don’t remind me,” said the girl.
Annette watched Harriett greet the hygienist, whose ass, even in scrubs, did appear to be sweet.
“If Harriett Osborne’s not selling drugs, what are all of these ladies buying?”
Her daughter snickered. “Payback,” she said.
Annette’s daughter had never shown a gift for prophesy—or for anything, other than alien massacres. But in that one word, Annette suddenly saw her whole future. She let the blinds fall back into place and didn’t say anything else.
The next night, Annette was lying in bed when her husband came home late from work. She remained silent and still as he headed straight for the bathroom as he always did. He liked to wash up before coming to bed. These little things she’d always blithely accepted—the late hours, the showers—had taken on new meaning. When he emerged a half hour later, Annette switched on the bedside lamp, ready to confront him. But her eyes were immediately drawn to a flaming red rash peeking out from the waistband of her husband’s tighty-whities and inching its way up his belly.
“What is that?” she gasped in horror.
Her husband snatched a shirt out of a drawer and pulled it on, hiding the rash. “What does it look like?” he snapped. “You bought the wrong soap again.”
He’d always been good at that—convincing her she hadn’t seen what she’d seen. But Annette suspected the rash was Harriett’s handiwork. Perhaps it was the payback the hygienist had been seeking. What could he have done to the woman to deserve such a punishment?
“No.” Annette wasn’t going to let it happen this time. “You didn’t get that from soap. You got it from something else that you shouldn’t have touched.”
She slept in the guest room that night—and all the nights after that.
By the end of the week, the rash had conquered her husband’s chest and scaled his neck past the collar of his shirt. Annette walked in on him in the bathroom as he was about to climb into an oatmeal bath and saw that it had consumed his entire body, all the way down to his ankles. She woke up that night to the sound of her husband tiptoeing past the guest room, down the stairs, and out the front door. Intrigued, she assumed her favorite position at the living room window. She saw him on his knees on Harriett Osborne’s porch, his rash-covered fingers woven together as he begged. Harriett didn’t appear to be listening. Her eyes had found Annette in the window across the street.
The next morning, after her husband went to work, Annette threw his clothes on the lawn and called an attorney. When the doorbell rang that afternoon, Annette opened the door to find Eric standing on her front porch. The sight of him in a tight T-shirt and jeans would have been gift enough. But he flashed his movie-star smile and held out a small brown paper bag.