Read Online Hot Flash Holidays by Nancy Thayer - Free Book Online Page A

hair when she was younger.
    “You look great, Mom,” Marilyn said.
    Ruth’s face lit up at the compliment. “Well, thank you, dear! I believe, no matter which God you believe in, it’s important to keep rituals in your life. It helps you remember to be grateful. To reflect on the cycle of birth, life, and dirt.”
    Marilyn bit her lip. Ruth had been a brilliant biology professor. Now, at eighty-five, her discourse was peppered with little malapropisms. Marilyn had phoned her sister Sharon about it, and they’d agreed it was probably a result of Ruth’s mini-strokes. They decided not to mention it to Ruth, who always seemed puzzled when they tried to correct her.
    Ostensibly, Ruth was visiting her daughter for a few weeks, an unexceptional, ordinary thing for a mother to do. Tacitly, Marilyn was supposed to watch Ruth for signs of senility so she could share her observations with Sharon and help her decide whether or not their mother should be “persuaded” to go into an assisted care facility.
    “I can’t make this kind of decision by myself,” Sharon had insisted during one of their many phone conversations this fall.
    “I agree. You shouldn’t have to,” Marilyn had assured her. She already felt guilty because Sharon had remained in the same Ohio town where they’d grown up, while Marilyn had moved east for college and remained east all her life. Marilyn flew back at least once a year to visit her mother, and she sent Ruth cards and gifts and phoned her often, but that didn’t compare with the time and care Sharon gave. But then Sharon, who was the older sister, and always bossy, liked to be in charge, while Marilyn, a paleobiologist and professor at MIT, craved huge quantities of solitude for her studies.
    Marilyn’s intellectual preoccupation was no doubt genetic, although nurture played its part as well, since both her parents, who had taught biology at a large state university, had spent much of Marilyn’s childhood lying on their stomachs in the backyard, observing insects.
    For a few halcyon years when Marilyn and Sharon were children, they’d been extraordinarily popular, because their parents loved to talk about nature and were full of amusing anecdotes, complete with illustrations.
The flatfish have both eyes on the same side of their
heads, and the eyes can migrate from side to side! Some
snakes have two heads! When the sea elephant becomes
angry, his nose swells up like a balloon!
    During their adolescent years, however, their peers began to consider their parents dorky and even weird. Their father loved to tell jokes—
Two hydrogen atoms
walk into a bar. One says, “I’ve lost my electron.” The
other asks, “Are you sure?” The first one says, “I’m
positive.”
—which made the teenagers groan and roll their eyes.
    It didn’t help that the professors, both of whom could describe in detail the colors of a deer botfly, dressed without any consideration of fashion. They wore clothes to keep from being cold or naked in public—the latter of which, they were always ready to discuss with the sisters’ contemporaries, was practiced in other cultures.
    Sharon had rebelled, becoming obsessed with clothing, hair, and current styles. She’d majored in economics and, after trying a number of jobs, had ended up as a corporate headhunter. Sharon was slick, stylish, and savvy. Marilyn had been the child who adopted her parents’ ways. But Marilyn had moved away, while Sharon remained in Ohio.
    So Sharon had been the one to help both parents, ten years ago, move out of their sprawling ranch house and into a small apartment in a comfortable retirement community. She had been the one to phone Marilyn when their father died, at seventy-eight, and when Marilyn flew back for the funeral, Sharon had been the one to suggest Marilyn help their mother sort through their father’s possessions.
    It had nearly broken Marilyn’s heart to give away her father’s beloved paraphernalia: the insect light