Goodbye To All That Read Online Free PDF

family room. “I’ll see you Saturday.”
    “One-thirty,” Jill reminded him.
    “Right.”
    “And don’t tell anyone.”
    “Right.” He thumbed the disconnect button and stifled a groan. A divorce. How? Why?
    Son of a bitch. A faint smile caught his mouth as he considered the most obvious why . His father—that old fox—must have something going on the side. A patient, maybe. Someone whose life he’d saved with a well-placed stent who simply had to show her gratitude to him. Or a lusty young nurse. Doug had never met the sort of nurses he used to read about in girlie magazines when he’d been in high school, but maybe they existed. Maybe his father had crossed paths with one.
    Doug wished more than ever that he’d be hitting the links with his father on Saturday. The old man wouldn’t open up about his extracurricular activities in front of Jill and Melissa. And of course he wouldn’t feel comfortable discussing his peccadilloes in front of his wife. But he and Doug, man to man, somewhere around the fourth hole  . . . He’d love to hear what the senior Dr. Bendel was up to.
    His amusement was instantly replaced by a remorse-tinged flare of indignation on his mother’s behalf. If the senior Dr. Bendel was performing pelvics on some lusty, busty young nurse, Doug might have to chew him out. He might have to lecture him to shape up, to show some respect for the woman who’d borne his children. For God’s sake, Doug’s father was too old to be having a mid-life crisis.
    Of course, if the nurse was really hot  . . .
    Shaking his head, he returned to the kitchen and set the phone back in its cradle to recharge. Brooke had moved to the sink and was hunkered down so she could view the girls at eye level while they blathered at her about something they’d just seen on television. Something utterly hilarious, given their shrill giggles and breathless descriptions.
    He hovered near the cooking island, watching them through the plumes of steam that rose from the pot of boiling pasta. Madison wore a striped jumper and Mackenzie had on pink overalls. They refused to dress identically, which made life easier for their teachers and friends. They no longer looked identical to him, either, but that was because he was their father and knew them so well. He knew Madison liked to suck on her hair and Mackenzie tilted her head when she wanted to ask a question. When Madison was excited, she tended to hop on one foot, whereas Mackenzie preferred to bounce on both feet.
    Right now, they were so involved in describing the show they’d been watching that they didn’t even notice their father’s arrival in the kitchen.
    Brooke didn’t notice him, either. She looked slightly blurry through the fog rising up from the pot, nodding and smiling and managing to sneak a sip of her wine as the girls twittered and fluttered like baby birds attempting to fly.
    He didn’t understand a word they said. Watching them was like watching a foreign film without the subtitles. He observed, admiring his girls, his beautiful girls, all three of them, all of them his. He observed and wondered what Brooke would think when he told her about his parents.

Chapter Four
     
    One bedroom with big closets, or two bedrooms with small closets? The truth was, Melissa needed more space for her clothes than she did for herself.
    What would she do with a second bedroom, anyway? She wasn’t about to turn it into a nursery. She wanted kids, but she also wanted to make partner at the law firm, and she figured she ought to secure a partnership first. Plus, she probably ought to get married, although that wasn’t a necessity. Lots of women had babies without getting married. Professional women. New York-type women.
    On the other hand, having a husband as well as a baby meant that in the two-tenths-of-a-percent of your life that wasn’t consumed by changing diapers and nursing the kid and trying to keep your career from flat-lining, you might be able to