Sweet Memories Read Free Page A

me to resist. See you soon. Dad.”
    The four of them shared a laugh, but all the while Theresa stood with the broad end of Jeff’s guitar case resting on the floor at her toes, and the narrow end shielding the front of her coat. She was the delegate hostess. She should ask for Brian’s jacket and hat and make a move toward the hall closet.
    “Come on, Brian,” Jeff invited, “see the rest of the place.” They moved to the living room and immediately four raucous, jarring chords sounded from the piano. Theresa grimaced and glanced at Amy who rolled her eyeballs. It was “Jeff’s Outer Space Concerto.”
    They drew deep breaths in unison, signaled with nods and bellowed simultaneously, “Je-e-e-eff, knock it off!” While the sisters giggled, Jeff explained to Brian, “I composed that when I was thirteen ... before I became an impresario.”
    Theresa quickly hung up her coat in the front-hall closet and hustled down the hall to her bedroom. She found a pale blue cardigan sweater and whisked it across her shoulders without slipping her arms into the sleeves, then buttoned the top button at her throat. She glanced critically in the mirror, realigned the button-and-buttonhole panels so the sweater covered as much of her as possible, but found to her dismay it did little to disguise her problem.  Oh God, will lever learn to live with it?
    Her usual, end-of-the day backache plagued again, and she sighed, straightening her shoulders, but to no avail.
    The house tour had stopped in the living room where Jeff had found his Stella. He was twanging out some metallic chords and singing an offbeat melody while Theresa tried to bolster her courage and walk out there. Undoubtedly it would be the same as it always was when she met a man. Brian Scanlon would scarcely glance at her face before his eyes would drop to her breasts and he would become transfixed by them. Since puberty she had relived those awful moments too many times to count, but Theresa had never become inured. That horrifying instant when a man’s eyebrows twitched up in surprise, and his lips dropped open while he stared at the outsized mammary glands that had, through some unfortunate freak of nature, grown to proportions resembling volleyballs. They rode out before Theresa like a flagship before a fleet, their double-D circumference made the more pronounced by her delicately boned size-nine frame.
    The last time she’d been introduced to a strange man he was the father of one of her second-grade pupils. Even as a parent, the poor man hadn’t been able to remember protocol in his shock at glimpsing her enormous breasts. His eyes had riveted on them even while he was shaking Theresa’s hand, and after that there’d been such awful tension between them the conference had been a disaster.
    If she had carved a notch on her bedroom dresser every time that had happened down through the years, there’d be nothing before her now but a pile of wood chips. Now meeting the apprehensive eyes of the woman reflected in the mirror, Theresa quailed with all the familiar misgivings. Red hair and freckles! As if it wasn’t enough that she’d been cursed with these mountainous breasts, she’d landed hair the color of paprika and skin that refused to tan. Instead it broke out in brilliant orange heat spots, as if she had an incurable rash, each time the sun grazed her skin. And this hair—oh, how she hated it! Coarse, springy ringlets that clung to her scalp like a Brillo pad if cut short, or if allowed to grow long, developed untamable waves reminiscent of those disastrous messes fried onto women’s heads in the early days of the century before hot permanents had been perfected. Detesting it either way, she’d chosen a middle-of-the road length and as innocuous a style as she could manage, brushing it straight back from her face and clasping it at her nape with a wide barrette, below which the “tail” erupted like a ball of fire from a volcano.
    And what about