The Hot Flash Club Chills Out
industrial sewing machines and fabric-cutting and ironing equipment, and set up a day care for the children of the women workers. Havenly Yours was
happening.
In fact, it was on the brink of expanding.
    And the thought of expanding made Polly want to weep with exhaustion. She was tired of spending five days a week at Havenly Yours. She was crinkled like a potato chip from bending over tables, lifting heavy bolts of fabric, squinting to inspect seams, listening to personal problems and offering creative solutions. By the weekend, she had no energy left to sew for her own customers.
    Plus, there was the money thing. She hadn’t asked to be paid, and she wouldn’t starve without a salary, but without money coming in from her own business, she had to live more frugally than she liked. Alice and Faye had both been in at the start of the business, Alice setting up the bookkeeping and Faye helping with the designs, but now a professional bookkeeper ran that part of the business and Faye had gone back to her first love and real talent, painting.
    But Polly had stayed on. And
why
?
    At the core of Polly’s dilemma was a problem as old as high school: she was the new girl. She was, in fact, the fifth wheel, and what was that cliché? As useless as a fifth wheel? She’d met the four other Hot Flash Club women a year after
they
’d all bonded, and while she felt loved and supported by them, while she never felt at all slighted by any of them, she still felt—well,
expendable.
But she
was
essential to Havenly Yours. She was afraid that if she stopped supervising the seamstresses, they’d have to find someone to take Polly’s place, and paying another salary would diminish the profits Havenly Yours was showing.
    Really, it wasn’t such difficult work, Polly reminded herself. She enjoyed all the women, and she was learning Spanish without trying, and the colors and fabrics were all so luscious.
    She parked her car in her drive, grabbed the mail from the box, and entered her house. Her dear basset hound Roy Orbison waddled up to her as fast as his stubby legs would carry him, tail wagging.
    “Hello, old friend.” Polly bent to scratch him at his favorite spot just above his tail. “Want to go out?”
    She led him out to the backyard, collapsing on the porch steps while the dog performed his duties and sniffed the grass for messages. The May evening was golden. Polly should really start weeding around her iris, but she was just too tired.
    “Come on, Roy,” she said, curtailing his evening’s constitutional. “I’ve got to lie down.”
    Roy studied her with his soulful eyes, then, with one of his enormous sighs, followed her back into the house. Polly fed him an extra chunk of food as reward for his good-natured acquiescence, and then dragged her exhausted blubber up the stairs, collapsed on top of the bed, and fell asleep at once.

    When she woke, she could tell by the way the light spilled through her curtains that it was evening. For a while, she lay there, warm and drowsy, letting her thoughts flow and twine like reeds in a stream. She thought about Havenly Yours, and she wondered whether she ought to have a plasterer in to redo the bedroom ceiling. Over the years she’d become accustomed to the series of wandering cracks, even oddly fond of them, as if they were developing in sympathy with the wrinkles in her own face. She didn’t want to change the bedroom ceiling, really. But when did the cracks stop being a superficial problem and become a warning sign that the ceiling might collapse on her at any moment?
    Were the cracks becoming deeper, longer? Or was she just so depressed these days that everything took on a more somber cast?
    She’d always been an optimist. She still was. Her good-natured acceptance of the inexplicable ways of man had helped her survive the bizarre turn her life had taken when her son David, her only child, had married Amy Anderson, a slender, sweet-faced vegetarian whose will-o’-the-wisp
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