With everything going on with the school fraud bullshit and my dad not here and Frankie turning and Michael breaking my heart, my skin starts to get red and itchy and all across my stomach and up my arms I break out with a gross, blistery rash.
“It could be stress,” says the derm, studying my skin through a magnifying glass.
I’ve now met the one person in the world who doesn’t know that my dad has been put away for life. She writes me prescriptions for hydrocortisone cream and antihistamine pills and then looks up at me.
“What do you do to relax?”
Relax?
I don’t have an answer to that so we talk about exercise, and she tells me that after her mom died she started running and now she’s addicted. She’s lost over ten pounds and has a tighter body. She says it totally helped her deal with all the shit of being a doctor with the insurance reimbursement mess, never mind that being the mother of a six-year-old makes her nuts.
I guess because I’m listening so hard she tells me that she doesn’t sleep with her husband anymore and that they’re heading for divorce because he met someone online, and I’m thinking about telling her that she needs a shrink more than I do, but running does sound kind of cool, and after I get into shape I could learn to box, which would be totally out-there.
I pay the twenty dollar co-pay and leave with the prescriptions and at the front desk scoop up about twenty freebie samples of Eucerin cream and Neutrogena SPF 50 and slip them into my purse. Then I realize that the nurse was watching and she shoots me a dirty look.