The Hot Flash Club Read Online Free PDF Page B

her a kind of power that had, along with her intelligence, ambition, and intuition, carried her up the ladder of corporate success. It was important to her work that she be attractive. No one said this, but it was true: The vice president in charge of administration for the TransContinent Insurance Corporation, especially if she was an African-American female, had to look good.
    And for years she’d looked
great
. All her life she’d been attractive, until a few years ago, when it began to take some amount of maintenance on her part— exercise, diet, hair color, makeup. After fifty, the effort was almost daunting, but she was determined. She looked more chic than sexy, but chic worked.
    Then, suddenly, it seemed, she woke up one morning to discover she was sixty-two.
    It was as if she were a tiger, powerful, sinuous, burning bright, padding majestically through the jungle of life. Pausing to look in the mirror, she discovered that somehow, overnight, she’d become a sheep. A gray, common,
creaking
sheep.
    Worse, other people saw her as a sheep.
    Sheep were easy prey for jackals, lions, and wolves.
    She cursed as she dressed for work. Her newest suit, for which she’d paid over a thousand dollars, was too tight at the waist. She could scarcely fasten it. After lunch, she’d be in agony and, unless she was lucky, the button would fly off during a conference and hit one of the new honchos in the eye. It was the style now for younger women to wear their shirts out over the waist rather than tucked in. When Alice tried it, she felt chubby and sloppy, and she remembered all those years of telling her sons to tuck their shirts in. Still, she left her white shirt out, pulled the suit jacket on, and left it unbuttoned. Not the best of looks, but it would do.
    As long as she didn’t have to raise her arms. The sleeves were suddenly too tight, pulling at her shoulders. It seemed, these days, she gained weight while simply breathing air.
    Now, shoes. The pair that coordinated with the suit had cost over four hundred dollars. Black, with a boxy three-inch heel, they made her legs look fabulous. The pleasure she got from the other corporate heads stealing glimpses of her legs almost offset the sheer torture of wearing them.
    God, she was vain, and she knew it! However, her vanity was not just a personal flaw, it was also a professional tool. Three months ago, TransContinent merged with Champion Insurance and became TransWorld. Its new, glittering headquarters towered in the heart of downtown Boston, only minutes from Alice’s condo on Boston Harbor. She could walk there easily, but she wasn’t going to today. Not in these shoes. She headed out to her sleek black Audi and entered the early-morning traffic.
    Alice’s job was to develop and implement umbrella policies for management information procedures, employee benefit policies, and human resource plans in and among the complicated network of offices.
    A lovely, fit, energetic, brilliant, cocky,
younger
woman had come from Champion to work with Alice as assistant to the vice president in charge of administration.
    Alison Cummings. Thirty-two, unmarried, no children, a Harvard MBA.
    It bit Alice’s ass that this young princess was named Alison. Until her arrival, everyone had called Alice by the shortened version of her name. Going by Al had endowed her with the power of masculinity in written communications and online, as well as providing a slight frisson of sexuality in face-to-face meetings, because she was so obviously female. It had
worked
for her. But Alison also went by Al, and during their first superficially pleasant and deeply cold-blooded meeting, the two women had agreed with gritted teeth that both would give up the nickname and go by their full names, to avoid confusion. Alice had thought Alison should, because of Alice’s seniority, be respectful and extend to Alice the right to go by Al, but that thought didn’t seem to cross anywhere near the younger woman’s