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Dedication

For Ty Gurney

Thank you

Some books are meticulously crafted, painstakingly pieced together, while others arrive in an adrenaline rush of ifs and maybes. Flirting with Forty was the latter, coming to me in one swoop while I sat poolside at the Halekulani in Hawaii. The idea came to me as though I were watching the trailer of a movie, a colorful teaser with a beginning, middle, and end. But a movie trailer isn’t a movie, and a premise and sample chapters do not make a book. Grateful appreciation to my agent, Karen Solem, for her constant support and encouragement as I find my footing in every book, and admiration and gratitude to my gifted editor at Warner Books, Karen Kosztolnyik, for her invaluable thoughts, editing, and insight. I love working with people who care about books and stories as passionately as I do. Thank you.

As this is a book about friendship and women, I must thank a few of the women who have taught me what I know about friendship today: my two best friends from high school, Cyndi Johnson and Anne Morse; and my gal pals in Bellevue, Washington, Lisa Johnson, Sinclair Sawhney, and Joan Lambert.

And final thanks to my children, Jake and Ty Gaskins, who have taught me the meaning of humility, compassion, courage, and love.

Chapter One

One

Ah, Christmas. The most wonderful time of the year. Not. Not if you’re a newly single mom. People say crowds at the malls or lines at the post office ruin Christmas. I say it’s the damn Christmas tree.

The whole Christmas tree thing is miserable, wasn’t designed for women, and certainly not for women with young children.

Christmas trees require a man, or a gaggle of women friends, but when you’re my age and Time magazine calls your generation “soccer moms,” you know your friends will go to lunch with you, have a girls’ night out (which means expensive cocktails at a swanky place), or indulge in a manicure/pedicure spa date, but they don’t go Christmas tree shopping with you, and they won’t do the lifting, hauling, tying, untying, hauling, and lifting that’s required to get the tree from lot onto car, home, and then into stand.

I’m no weakling—I work out—but I’ve yet to meet a full, fresh noble fir that’s, well… light.