The Hot Flash Club by Nancy Thayer Read Free Book Online Page B

vibrations of his cycle disappeared from the air. Everything was quiet.
    Shirley blinked. She couldn’t absorb it. She couldn’t believe he wouldn’t come roaring around the block, and back up into her driveway and her life.
    She just stood there, waiting, like a
dope
, until the furnace kicked on, its ancient rattle alerting her: She was freezing and letting cold air into the house. But she felt that if she shut the door, it would be final. Jimmy would really be gone.
    Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted her mailbox. Fetching the mail was never fun. All she ever got was bills, and it occurred to her that Jimmy, who didn’t help with her mortgage, hadn’t paid for last month’s share of the groceries and utilities. Again.
    Reaching into the rusting metal box, she found three pieces crammed in. As she wrenched them out, the lid broke with a squeak, then just hung there, dangling pathetically by one hinge.
    She slammed the front door shut and leaned against it, drained of energy and hope. Jimmy was gone.
    But the familiar old longing returned, the old and powerful craving for that which would fill the emptiness, dull the sorrow, and bring back the sense of joy she’d felt in her dream this morning. Her old friend/demon/enemy: alcohol.
    But jeez Louise, no herbal teas or meditations would get her over this pain of Jimmy leaving.
    She flopped down on the sofa and tossed the mail on the coffee table. Sure enough, the mortgage bill was there, and the gas bill.
    Shirley Gold, welcome to your life. Tears burned her eyes. Dear sweet Jesus, she wanted a drink! Just one. One small scotch, and she’d feel so much better.
    Then she saw, through tear-blurred eyes, the third piece of mail. Something handwritten on quality stock. What on earth?
    Grabbing it up, she studied the address. It was her name, all right. She ripped open the envelope. It was an invitation to a party for Eloise Linley, one of her massage clients.
    Well, hot damn!
    Her dream had been prophetic.
    This was enough to make her believe in anything.
    Maybe she could even believe in herself.

7
    MARILYN
    Under the buzzing lights of the university lab, Marilyn bent over a table, brushing with meticulous care at a slab of shale.
    It was after seven o’clock on Thursday night. Theodore was off at a conference for a week, so she didn’t need to worry about fixing dinner for him. She could stop by Martino’s, pick up some salads, brew a pot of coffee, spread the newest science journals out on the dining room table, and read.
    Faraday McAdam strolled into the room. Faraday was about Marilyn’s age, and handsome, if you liked red hair and a ruddy complexion. He wore a heathy tweed jacket and a cheerful tartan vest.
    “Marilyn! I’m surprised to see you here.”
    “Really? Why?” Faraday was a colleague of Marilyn’s, a paleobiologist. He was always extremely nice to Marilyn, which proved, her husband Theodore said, that he was jealous of Theodore and trying to weasel the secrets of Theodore’s work from her. Marilyn thought this didn’t quite make sense—Theodore was a molecular geneticist, his field different from Faraday’s—but as Theodore had pointed out, if Faraday didn’t want to pry into Theodore’s work, or at least try to hang on his coattails, why did he spend so much time around Marilyn?
    Faraday said, his brow furrowed in puzzlement, “I thought you’d be in Hawaii. With Theodore.”
    So there you are, Marilyn thought.
Theodore.
“It’s a scientific conference, Faraday, not a vacation.”
    “Oh, come on, you know we always mix pleasure with business at these things. Besides,
you
could have had a vacation. You could have gone along and enjoyed some sunshine.”
    They turned to look at the window, where sleet tapped with an almost musical rhythm.
    “I wanted to keep working,” she told him truthfully. Well, half-truthfully. It was Marilyn’s own intellectual ardor that kept her bent over her work. Faraday didn’t need to know that