The Hot Flash Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

was working on the meticulous extraction of a trilobite from a slab of Ordovician shale.
    Instead, she drove to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Its hushed, eccentric opulence always provided an atmosphere where she could think.
    As she drove she tried to look at the situation logically. First of all, she reminded herself, consider the source: Sharon was a loving sister, married for years, with her own thriving business and two grown, married children. She loved Marilyn and her family, so it was not with malicious intent that Sharon had stirred up this hornet’s nest in Marilyn’s heart.
    Blunt, practical, and honest, Sharon was a superb problem solver. Marilyn, in contrast, was dreamy-minded in an intellectual way. She tended to let the teakettle rattle dry as she stood two feet away, field glasses in her hands, watching crows feed in the backyard. Fortunately, her husband was just as preoccupied with his own thoughts about the mysterious puzzle of genetics. In fact, over the past few months, Theodore had taken to eating most of his meals out because it took too much time from his work to drive home to eat. Fine with Marilyn, who was delighted to be released from the kitchen; she had more time for her own research.
    Neither Theodore nor Marilyn had ever longed for riches or the luxurious life money could ensure. It was a passion for the scientific process that had driven Theodore to discover how to alter the gene of a parasite that killed expensive exotic fish so that the gene self-destructed before it could harm the fish. When a pharmaceutical company that sold, among other drugs, preventive medicine to the aquarium industry, bought Theodore’s formula for a staggering sum, Theodore and Marilyn had laughed and popped a bottle of champagne. Then they’d wandered back to their work, leaving the champagne to go flat. Their colleagues urged them to take a trip to some exotic place, but the thought of being away from their work horrified them, as did the suggestion that they dislodge their books and papers from their Victorian house near the university simply to move to a more prestigious address. They’d spoken, briefly, about hiring a housekeeper, so that Marilyn would have more time for her lab work, but her teaching was only part-time at the most, and they were terrified by the very thought of someone moving their papers and books around. In the end, they decided to send their laundry out and live with dust and clutter.
    Teddy took after both of them. When Teddy turned twenty-one, Theodore had given him a seven-figure check, as he did when Teddy won his doctorate in genetic biology at Harvard. Teddy had thanked his father, then stuck the money in the bank and continued to live in a rented apartment near MIT. He was too busy with his own research for frivolous matters, and his parents understood that completely.
    Marilyn showed her pass, entered the Gardner, and settled on a bench in the sunny courtyard, filled with statuary and, today, a plethora of lilies and azalea. Hidden deep in the pots, beneath the leaves and showy blossoms, unseen minuscule creatures were busily going about their everyday work, waving their antennae, crawling, chomping, defecating, tunneling, mating—
    Teddy. Her son. Her wonderful brilliant son.
    What had Sharon called him? A dweeb. A nerd. A
twerp
.
    Rather unkind, but not inaccurate. Like his father, Teddy was portly, was losing his hair, and wore heavy, black-rimmed glasses. Yet it had never occurred to any of them that he could be unattractive. He’d always had girlfriends. He’d had a steady girlfriend in high school, dear little Ursula, who
was
ursine in appearance, squat and burly, low to the ground, with beady dark eyes, thick dark hair—on her arms and legs as well as her head—and an incipient mustache. Ursula played field hockey and the violin. Recently she’d married another violinist and moved somewhere in the Midwest.
    In college, there had been several girls. Candy had