The Hot Flash Club Strikes Again Read Free Page A

very much.” Claudia undid her seat belt and opened the car door.
    “I’ll phone you when the baby’s here,” Polly called out cheerfully.
    “If you wish,” Claudia replied. “It’s of no particular interest to me.” Without a backward glance, Claudia strode up the sidewalk and into her house.
    ——————————
    Now Polly leaned on her spade, watching the sky turn indigo. Her back ached pleasantly and the outdoor labor had filled her with a mild euphoria and a sense of accomplishment. A fat orange sun rolled low in the sky, casting a benevolent glow on the earth, and the air was sweet and chilly, with a bracing fall tang. I’ll phone Claudia, Polly decided, to tell her about Jehoshaphat.
    Why bother? she asked herself.
    Because, Polly told herself, I believe in love, all kinds of love.
    She believed in romantic love, of course, and how could she not, when she had been married to a man she loved passionately for eighteen years? Even before she’d met Tucker, she’d believed in all kinds of love. Her faith had infused her life.
    Maternal love, she believed in, beyond doubt, because her only child, David, had, over the thirty-four years of his life, brought her the most profound joys, even though he also had sent her into some of her most extreme fits of insanity.
    And brotherly love, or general love, whatever it could be called, Polly believed in that, too. At some point in her life she had come to a kind of bedrock belief that all life was a struggle between good and evil, darkness and light, love and hate. She firmly believed that every individual’s actions tipped the balance toward good or evil, and that if there was anything she, as one individual, could do, it would be always to try to choose the good, even when she found it difficult.
    So she would not let herself pout because she hadn’t been invited out to see her grandchild. She would put away her gardening tools and pour herself a glass of wine and rejoice that her son had gained a wife and a tractor and a boxed set of relatives, and now a son of his own. She would be pleasant to her mother-in-law and respectful of her daughter-in-law. She would patiently wait to hold her grandchild in her arms.

2
    Twenty-six years old, five feet one, and weighing, with all her clothes on, scarcely one hundred pounds, Beth wasn’t the bravest person at the best of times, but tonight she was
determined
to ask her boyfriend, Sonny, about something that was driving her crazy.
    She and Sonny had been dating for three months now. They’d been sleeping together for two. They read the same thrillers and discussed them over dinner at Beth’s. They went to movies and Sonny took her out to dinner afterward. He phoned her every morning to say hello; he’d taken her for a week’s vacation on the Cape in August and had reserved a room for them in Vermont in the fall for a romantic leaf-peaking weekend. She trusted him. She loved him. And from the way he made love to her, she could almost believe he was in love with her.
    But he never asked her to do anything on Sundays, and often during the week, when she phoned him, he wasn’t home. Was he seeing another woman?
Sleeping
with another woman?
    She
had
to know.
    ——————————
    Beth had first set eyes on Sonny one Saturday afternoon in a bookstore. Outside, rain streamed down from a sky as gray and low as a bad dream. June’s welcome warmth had been washed away by the rain, leaving the air chilly, even sharp. The grass was sodden, muddy, the flowers bent nearly sideways by the downpour, the streets geysered with spray from passing cars. The forecast was for rain all day long.
    Inside, the bookshop was warm, bright, and inviting, its aisles filled with other readers on the prowl for just the right book. Music softly lilted through the air, as gently tantalizing as the aroma of hot chocolate drifting from the coffee shop in the corner. Beth loved the spaciousness of the large store, the sense of an