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

mouth shut. If Marshmallow Fluff were the Elmer’s glue of Agnes’s bond with Belinda, Julia would not interfere, especially since Tim, a dentist, and wildly cavity-conscious, didn’t try to intervene.
    Fortunately, Agnes and her retired, rather passive husband, George, lived three hours away in the western part of the state. Unfortunately, Agnes and George visited often, seldom notifying Julia in advance, but swooping down like a pair of turkey vultures hoping to spot a carcass.
Julia’s
carcass.
    Agnes wanted Belinda to live with them;
they
knew how to raise children. Julia, they pointed out loudly and often, had no experience. Clearly Agnes thought Julia was a snaggletoothed evil stepmother from her worst fairy tale, a judgment that could only get worse if Belinda went into one of her pathetic crying spells.
    But Belinda cried when she had to go visit her grandparents. Agnes insisted Belinda spend two weeks of every summer and two or three days of every major holiday with her grandparents. During the ride to the western part of the state, Belinda reverted to infantile behavior, sucking her thumb and rubbing her cheek on Kitty Ballerina’s. She had to be lifted out of the car and carried up to her grandparents’ house, and when Tim and Julia arrived to bring her home, she was waiting, nose pressed against the window. Couldn’t Agnes
see
all that? Julia tried to respond to Agnes’s dislike with tolerance and kindness—she did feel great sympathy for this woman who had lost her beloved daughter. But it was difficult, especially since Julia’s best efforts never pleased Agnes. Tim’s own mother had died a few years ago, and his father had retired to Florida, so Agnes and George were really the only grandparents Belinda knew, and Julia longed for a smoother, more cooperative relationship. Julia had asked Tim whether they should see a family counselor. Tim reminded her that none of the therapists he’d seen before had helped Belinda come out of her spell of muteness. Patience, they’d all advised. Patience, and the healing powers of time.
    Now, as Julia finished making Belinda’s bed, pulling the Barbie doll sheets tight and tucking them, each in her exact place, she tried to cheer herself by humming a jaunty little tune.
    But humming made Julia’s throat burn. And her ears ached. This had been happening more and more recently, so often that she was just, slightly, worried. She went into the bathroom and took one of the sinus-relief tablets she’d bought last week. She had no fever. She felt well and full of energy. If this was some idiotic psychosomatic trick her body was playing on her, she would—what? Well, she’d be glad; because if it wasn’t, then something serious was going haywire in her head.

5
    It was like being hit by a tornado. It knocked the breath out of her, turned her life upside down. She was like Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz,
but in reverse: her life, which until today had been brilliant with color, all at once faded to black and white.
    Faye put down the phone and sat quite still, just looking around her condo, trying to make sense of her life. She thought she’d done so well!
    Two years ago, she’d been happy, living with her husband in the spacious home where they’d raised their daughter, Laura, to adulthood, where, in Faye’s third-floor studio, she’d painted still lifes that sold often and well. Then Jack was felled by an unexpected heart attack. Suddenly alone in the large house, Faye found herself so stunned by grief she could no longer paint. She struggled valiantly to live with loss, and then menopause hit her, hard. And
then
Laura had come to her, sobbing, because she thought
her
husband was having an affair.
    Thank heaven, in the midst of it all, she’d met Marilyn, Shirley, and Alice, women her age, who shared similar problems. They’d formed the Hot Flash Club, and Faye’s life had turned around.
    With their encouragement and advice, Faye had sold her home. She’d