Just that morning I’d been complaining to my wife about having no friends; then of course three sent me nice emails at work, and now here I was having sushi with another friend.

“I don’t know why,” she said. “I just enjoy humiliating people. Is that the word? Humiliate? Insult, whatever. It’s just the way I am.”

I noticed she was wearing a darker shade of foundation, and her makeup seemed different; thicker.

She asked me how I was and I told her and it sounded funny. “I sound like I’ve been seeing a therapist, don’t I?”

The waitress brought our sushi bento lunch special and my friend reminded her in Chinese that she’d ordered extra wasabi.

“How’s that going? You still seeing him?”

“My wife says he’s not good for me because I’m not happy yet. He says one of my issues is I let my wife make all my decisions for me. That is, not exactly; my issue is I base every decision on what my wife would think.”

“Do you?”

I shrugged. “Isn’t that called being considerate? What’s new with you?”

She told me she was stressed out. She and her husband were building a new house and she was starting a new business on the side. “Here.” She handed me three little vials labeled in Chinese. All I could read were the numbers 1, 2 and 3.

“I found the company on the Internet. It’s that collagen treatment I told you about. You said you would test it for me.”

“Yeah, I remember,” I said. “So what’s what? How do you use them?”

“You put number 1 on first. Then number 2. Number 3 goes around your eyes like this.”

“I’ll let you know how it works.”

The next morning, after my wife had left for work and while my daughter was dressing for school, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and took the lids off the vials. The ends were still sealed and I had to rummage around for a scissors to clip them off. Number 1, a thin liquid, went mostly over my forehead and temples and around the eyes, number 2, creamier, over that. My worry line between my eyebrows was deeper than I remembered, I noticed.

Number three, a thinner creme, I put over my crowsfeet. Then I smiled at myself, and the wrinkles around my eyes deepened. Laugh lines, I told myself.

“What are you doing in there, dad?” my daughter asked through the door.

“Washing my hands,” I said.

My face felt hot on the way into work. Something was happening, at least. I looked at myself in the rear view mirror a few times on the drive in. It wasn’t unbearably hot, although a few little pre-cancerous spots my skin doctor had tried to remove earlier really stung.

The next week we had lunch again. Her makeup was even thicker, I noticed.

“So it cures cancer, is what you’re saying,” she said.

“Pre-cancerous lesions. Or sunspots, I’m not a dermatologist. Whatever. Yeah, they’re gone. But my face looks like a grey sponge,” I said.

“I’ll put that on my website, the cures cancer part. Excellent,” she said.

“So does my skin go back to normal when I stop using this?”

She shrugged. The waitress was walking past and my friend asked for the check. “Just be sure to use up the samples I gave you,” she said. “You have to complete the whole course of treatment.”

“It’s my turn to pay,” I said.

She waved her hand at me dismissively. “It’s the least I can do.”