Bette smiled at him, "I think I can handle a ski run, Brom. As I said, maybe the exercise will get me going. My dad used to say that a good run was a better cure for a fever than anything else."  They shared a laugh, as she continued, "He said he got that attitude from his mom, who used to tell him when he was sick with a cold or something, "oh, feeling sick? Here, take this broom and sweep the store out. Might as well do something around the store to help me if you’re staying home from school today."

They were still chuckling over Bette’s story as they got to the reception desk.  Brom asked the man if they had medicine for a cold, paused to look at Bette again, and asked for a type of medicinal tea that someone had given him when he’d had a cold himself, the last time he, Luke, and Matthew had been at the resort.  The man nodded, indicating that they had both.  

As they waited, leaning against the rounded edge of the broad mahogany desk, Brom was grinning still over Bette’s story, "Now, I don’t have a story like that.  Whenever I got a cold or ran a fever, I was consigned to the bed by a nanny, who made sure someone was watching my door, in case I tried to sneak out and play or something. Pretty boring…"

"What…your mom or dad didn’t check in on you?"  

Brom frowned, and shook his head.

"They weren’t that involved in our lives," he said in a flat voice, "which was okay, I guess, for that generation. These days that approach is probably frowned upon, huh?"

Bette gave him a half-smile, and paused to consider what to say first.  For one thing, on various aspects of their life-experiences, there’d been many occasions already that showed how markedly different they were from one another.   On the other hand, though, they’d managed to somehow turn those differences into the most interesting discussions and conversations, which helped draw them closer as friends.

"Brom, parenting approaches in every generation have probably always been diverse.  What your parents chose to do, how my dad chose to parent me, how his mom did, etc., … all dictated, possibly, by their own particular situations," she started.  As Brom nodded slowly, she continued with a rueful smile, "Being a parent myself, I know I or we don’t always make the right decisions.  I’m pretty sure we’ve made a lot of mistakes already, despite our best efforts. Sometimes, I have to admit some choices are dictated by wanting to be different from our own parents.  So there are many things that we’re doing that my dad would not have done. Tina seems particularly careful, too, not to replicate some things that she recalls not being the best thing to experience, as a child."