Itch
On my way to the club, I passed the Barnetts’ rental house.
Their car was out front with a couple of bicycles attached to the rack on the back and a row of suitcases lined up beside it, along with a cooler and some fishing equipment and a pet carrier.
Though most summer people chose to stay through the Labor Day weekend, it appeared that the Barnetts were leaving Lake Catherine early.
I watched as the two of them stepped out the door, Brenda holding her husband’s hand as they made their way toward the car, Kyle with his golf clubs over his shoulder, Brenda carrying the dog. She no longer appeared beautiful, or anything close.
Her legs appeared red and swollen and covered with scratch marks, but the worst was her face—which looked puffy and covered with runny sores.
One look and I understood what had caused this, though given how much time had passed since Brenda and Forrest’s rendezvous on the island, it seemed she must have an above-average sensitivity to poison ivy.
She probably had more than a few sores on her butt too.
Brenda stood scratching herself as her husband lifted their suitcases into the trunk of their car.
She set the dog in the carrier, put on her sunglasses, and settled into the front seat beside Kyle Barnett, who reached over to her now and gave her a peck on the earlobe to avoid her swollen and oozing cheek.
I guessed this was how it went with peoples’ marriages.
One day you might be lying on some moss with a man who wasn’t your husband, saying you couldn’t live without him.
You might even think you wanted to have a baby with him.
If you were a truly terrible person, determined to achieve your goal of nabbing him for your next partner, you might even come up with a plan to kill his wife.
But if it didn’t work out, you and your husband might just head back to Connecticut like nothing ever happened, with no more than a nasty case of poison ivy on your rear end (just my guess) to show for it all.