style="font-size:15px;"> “…and with the Gulf area’s incredible growth rate in housing—a boom that seems to have no end or even a peak—our design talents in this region will continue to be highly sought…”
Nora didn’t hear the rest. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears. She suddenly felt light-headed. Should she call 911, or was that premature? She would hate calling in a false alarm, but as her daughter often pointed out, Nora was much better at caring for others than for herself.
Pulse still pounding, she tried to restore a sense of inner calm. This might be simple anxiety, an everyday, garden-variety panic attack. True, she’d never had one before, but…
Weren’t cardiac events more typical in the early morning than at noon? Whew, the room did seem hot. Nora glanced across the table. Her gaze landed on her longtime nemesis, Starr Mulligan, with whom Nora had disagreed again only yesterday about a new client they both wanted—badly.
The memory provided a brief distraction. Nora’s business, in particular, had been thriving until the past couple of years. During a pair of especially powerful hurricane seasons, some of her clients had, sadly, lost their homes, and until they rebuilt their devastated properties they obviously had no use for Nora’s design services. There were no interiors. Then more recently, another, luckier client had reneged on his payment, and although Nora didn’t want to refer the account to a collection agency, she needed the money. Her cash flow was hurting, and the competition with Starr wasn’t helping her financial picture. Despite some personal misgivings about the new client they both wanted, Nora still needed the job.
Starr reminded her of Elizabeth Taylor soon after her first marriage to Richard Burton. A few pounds too heavy but still attractive, if not the stunning beauty Liz had been in her youth, with that same dark hair and those arresting lavender eyes.
Nora wasn’t mean-spirited by nature. She liked helping people, and she wanted to get along with Starr. But no matter what Nora did, they always seemed to wind up at each other’s throats. And it was Nora who tended to back down, to let Starr win.
At the moment, Starr’s coal-black hair failed to reflect the overhead light, and her normally piercing gaze stayed as dull as dust—Starr’s usual reaction to a boring after-lunch speaker. For a second, Nora forgot her own problems to wonder if Starr had fallen asleep with her eyes open. Maybe she was like a canary in a coal mine, and too much carbon monoxide floating through the cold air had zapped her into wide-eyed yet vague unconsciousness. Now it was causing Nora to…blush.
She reached for her napkin to fan herself.
Women didn’t have heart attacks at her age. Her birthday might be circled on her calendar next week in red—Nora would turn fifty—but she had hoped for more time before she had to fret about her health like Leonard Hackett, one of her favorite clients, who could be a world-class hypochondriac.
She couldn’t die. People needed her. Her mother, Maggie, who had already lived two-thirds of her life playing the helpless widow, was beginning to fail. Sooner or later she would require Nora’s help, whether or not Maggie wanted it. Then there were Nora’s two grown children. Savannah and Browning might sometimes accuse Nora of intruding in their lives (meddling was the word they used), but they, too, needed her. And what about her friends? Her dog?
But then, as if she’d been sacked like a quarterback during the Super Bowl, the truth struck her. Nora dropped her napkin with a soft plop on the linen tablecloth and jerked upright on her ivory damask-upholstered chair. Her eyes again met Starr’s across the round table.
And wouldn’t you know? Starr couldn’t resist arching a penciled eyebrow, which drew the attention of several other people in their circle. Worse for Nora, in the suddenly too-quiet ballroom Starr’s voice rang out like a Buddhist temple gong for all to hear.
“Hot flash, darling?”
“Mark, you have to do something,” Nora murmured later that afternoon, flat on her back in her gynecologist’s examining room. The peaceful blue and gray decor, which Nora had done, didn’t soothe her, but to her immense relief he had squeezed her into his schedule. Nora gazed down her body at her spread legs in the stainless steel stirrups she had hated since before her first pregnancy.
Dr. Mark Fingerhut patted her hand. “Nora, relax.”
His touch felt warm, comforting. He must remember her tendency to overreact.
“Why do you always say that? Relax? You know I despise white coats.” Actually, she adored him—all of his patients did—if not, at the moment, the specialty he had chosen to make his living.
Mark pushed his stool back from the exam table. He flicked dark hair from his eyes. They were brown, like bitter chocolate, but compassionate.
“Listen. I know you’re feeling a bit needy…”
“What I need, apparently, is to take ten years off my life.”
“Would that be chronological?” he said, sounding amused. “Or biological? There’s a difference, you know.” But of course he could afford to look smug. To Nora, he appeared too young to be a doctor at all, much less a highly respected gynecologist. And her daughter, Savannah, who was perhaps his newest patient, agreed with Nora. His boyish smile belied the fact that he was pushing forty.
“I have women in their early forties who are perimenopausal,” he said.
“What does that mean?” Fresh panic beat inside her like a hummingbird’s strong yet delicate wings.
Mark sighed, but his dark eyes twinkled behind his black oversize frames.
“In a way, you’re overdue.” With a quick glance at her chart, he snapped off his latex gloves. “Fifty—actually, 50.8—is the median age at which women in this country stop ovulating, which means some do when they’re slightly younger, others a bit later. Like those women, you’re about to undergo what was euphemistically known before the sexual revolution and women’s lib as The Change. These days, we tell it like it is.”
Her heart sank. “My ovaries are dying.”
“Well, not exactly. Slowing down, I’d say.” His smile broke through as he smoothed his hair. “You can sit up now. Put on your clothes and I’ll see you in my office. Then we’ll talk.”
“About what?”
He stepped out of the room into the hall. “Your future. There are some choices of treatment for your symptoms we need to consider.”
Symptoms? Alone, like the dying woman she’d feared she was at lunch, she saw her life flash before her eyes. Her childhood, alone with Maggie after Nora’s father died. Her marriage to Wilson, and the flaming torch she’d carried for years after their divorce. The births of her two children, and the joy they had given her, and still did. Despite her recent attempts to smooth away the lines of experience with a little Botox, and those necessary thrice-weekly trips to the gym to keep in reasonable shape, she was clearly, in Mark’s opinion, on her way out.
In the empty room, squishing excess K-Y jelly, Nora wriggled into her panties and skirt, tucked in her silk top and then slipped into her shoes. Blinking, she grabbed her jacket.
“The future,” she murmured.
She ducked out of the exam room into the corridor, then bypassed Mark’s office and kept going toward the reception area and
