Hot Flash Holidays by Nancy Thayer Read Free Book Online Page A

his wife, and their toddler, little Jehoshaphat, were coming to her house for Christmas Eve. Polly felt like she was preparing for a delegation from another planet.
    David dwelt with his vegetarian wife Amy and their darling baby Jehoshaphat on a farm outside Boston. Amy’s parents lived there, too, just up the driveway, and together they all grew vegetables and ran a precious little country store full of sour homemade jellies and scratchy hand-knitted apparel affordable only to the wealthiest and purest of souls.
    Polly often wondered at the currents of fate driving her family line. Her grandparents had struggled to survive on a potato farm in Ireland. Her parents had lived as penny-pinching but respectable citizens in South Boston. Polly had gone to college, where she met and married a handsome, adventurous, unreliable travel writer and explorer. Scott got Polly pregnant, then roamed away, eventually dying in a scuba-diving accident. Polly had raised their son David alone, until she met the love of her life, Tucker Lodge, a banker. Their marriage had been a happy one. David had adored his stepfather and, after college, had gone to work in Tucker’s bank. Then Tucker died of a heart attack. And David married Amy. And now Polly’s son was a farmer planting potatoes on Amy’s parents’ farm. Was there a potato-planting gene in her blood?
    Well, Polly thought as she unpacked the groceries, wouldn’t it be nice if that was the explanation? Wouldn’t it be helpful if, in future years, scientists isolated genes responsible for certain life choices, such as marrying someone diametrically different from one’s parents?
She
had certainly done that, shell-shocking her timid, safety-loving parents when she married her first husband.
    Since her son’s marriage to Amy, Polly had spent hours examining her early life choices. Really, she didn’t think the desire to shock, hurt, or impress her parents had played any part in her marriage to Scott. She’d been infatuated, completely
dazzled
by the man. He’d seemed so glamorous to her, and the life she’d lived with him, traveling to Peru and Mexico and the wild Newfoundland coast, had been exciting beyond her wildest dreams.
    Life after the divorce had been difficult, though. She’d made her living as a seamstress, and dedicated herself to providing a happy and safe home for her little boy. When David was twelve, Polly had married Tucker Lodge. Tucker was a reliable man, a wonderful provider, and a loving stepfather. His death three years ago had devastated Polly, and she knew David mourned him deeply, too.
    Was it possible that Amy and her family, so entrenched in their farm, with their smug rural virtues, were as dazzling and fascinating to David as Scott had been to Polly? Certainly David was thriving, if you could call changing from a wiry, energetic banker who liked theater and opera into a lumbering, overweight, red-faced, tractor-driving, potato-planting country bumpkin
thriving
!
    Oh, Polly wouldn’t care what David wore or did, if only Amy would allow her to see more of her grandson! Vegetarian Amy and her family acted as if they were civilized human beings while meat-eating Polly was some kind of Cro-Magnon creature, hooting and picking fleas off her fur. When Polly helped her mother-in-law, the year she was dying of cancer, Amy had not allowed her to see little Jehoshaphat, claiming that Polly might transmit dangerous germs. For a year, Polly had felt like some kind of leper.
    The silver lining had been that she’d taken a membership at The Haven, hoping to work off some of the stress. There, she’d met three younger women who became her friends, and later, the members of the Hot Flash Club, with whom she could laugh about the gritty realities of aging. Thanks to all her new friends, she’d developed the courage to persist in her attempts to forge some kind of relationship with her grandson and his mother’s tightly knit, terribly superior family.
    And tonight,