Blooming All Over (6 page)

“What about your film? The one with the car chase and the guy disconnected from life?”

“The infomercial would be a credit. It’ll open doors for me. I’d do it dramatically, artistically.”

His father’s eyes narrowed. “How dramatically and artistically?”

“How dramatic is a bagel? I’m trained in this stuff, Dad. I could pull it off.”

His father shook his head. “What I can’t get past, Rick, is that it seems like such a good idea. I know there’s got to be something wrong with it.”

Rick laughed. “It’s a good idea, Dad. Give me a green light. I’ll win Bloom’s an Oscar.”

His father shook his head again, regarding Rick with an expression that could imply either astonishment or pride. “I’ve got to think about it. I probably have to run it past Julia, too.”

Julia would say yes. Rick would get Susie to get Julia to say yes. If she said yes, his father would say yes. He’d be so proud one of his sons was doing something important for the store.

Rick was going to make his Bloom’s show. He was going to direct it. Produce it. Cast it. Film it. Rack up credits left and right. Build his name. Prepare his Oscar speech.

“Ten minutes!” Wendy sang out from the other end of the hall. “They said dinner’ll be here in ten minutes. I hope you’re in the mood for hot-and-sour soup, because I ordered a lot!”

“I hate hot-and-sour soup,” Rick’s father muttered, then smiled. “But for Wendy, I’ll eat it.”

“So will I,” Rick promised. If he ate the soup he’d make Wendy happy, and if Wendy was happy his father would be happy. And if his father was happy, Rick would be that much closer to making a Bloom’s movie.

“I
need a rhyme for pastrami,” Susie announced. She already had one rhyme,
salami
, but she needed another. Limericks made such demands on a poet.

She sat at the desk Julia had set up for her on the third floor of the Bloom Building, directly above the store. All the Bloom’s offices were there, accessible by both the store’s back stairway and the apartment building’s elevators. To avoid entering the store, Susie had ridden up on the elevator. If she’d gone through the store, she might have run into Casey, and she wasn’t ready to see him yet.

Monday mornings were awful under the best of circumstances, and today’s circumstances most assuredly didn’t qualify as best. The weekend had been hectic enough: watching Adam graduate, snapping so many photos with the digital camera her mother had bought for just this purpose that if she ever downloaded them all, her computer would crash from the overload, soothing her mother when she began blubbering about her little birds flying the nest, explaining the ceremony to Grandma Ida when she decided she couldn’t hear the speakers—which Susie would have considered a blessing, given that their speeches were about as stimulating as a sleeping pill—and making nice with Adam’s girlfriend’s flaky parents. Tash’s father kept ranting about
the puny wages Cornell paid its maintenance staff, and her mother—whose legs were as hairy as Tash’s, and probably Tash’s father’s, too—seemed to believe chlamydia was the biggest problem on college campuses today.

Maybe it was. Susie hadn’t spent serious time on a college campus in four years, and when she’d been at Bennington, the biggest problem on campus had probably been a three-way tie: discovering that the library had only one edition of the book you absolutely needed for a research paper and it had been checked out by someone who’d taken it home over winter break and neglected to bring it back; discovering that the guy you were madly in love with was boinking your roommate; and discovering that the food service had run out of brownies before you’d arrived at the dining hall and you were stuck eating oatmeal-raisin cookies for dessert. Chlamydia wouldn’t have even made the Top Ten.

“No, it’s true,” Tash’s mother had insisted. “Chlamydia has flooded the nation’s college campuses.” Grandma Ida’s hearing had sharpened in time for her to hear this comment. Fortunately, she seemed to think chlamydia was some sort of seafood chowder.

Susie had survived the commencement festivities. She’d helped Adam pack his junk—and most of it truly was junk—into the van, and she’d won him as her companion for the drive home, leaving Grandma Ida to ride home in Joffe’s brother’s Toyota. She’d helped Adam unload his junk at their mother’s apartment, and then she’d driven downtown and dropped the van off at Truck-a-Buck. The clerk insisted that there were more dark red splatters on the driver’s-side door than there had been when Susie and Julia had picked up the van Friday morning. Susie had argued that she hadn’t added
any new splatters while the van had been in her possession, and in any case, what difference did it make? The clerk agreed with her that another splatter more or less made no difference at all, and he’d accepted the van without tacking on any extra charges.

From Truck-a-Buck, Susie had taken the subway to her apartment. Both Caitlin and Anna had been home, devouring take-out Chinese and bickering over whether Peter Jennings was sexy. Anna thought he looked like someone’s uncle, and uncles by definition weren’t sexy. Caitlin thought he was worth sleeping with, although she pretty much felt that way about anyone with a penis.

There had been enough leftover lo mein for Susie to turn into a meal for herself. Ignoring the Peter Jennings debate, she’d checked her e-mails. Nothing from Casey.

Well, she hadn’t really expected an e-mail from him, had she? He never sent her e-mails. When he wanted to contact her he phoned, and she’d had her cell phone with her the entire time she’d been in Ithaca, so if he’d punched in her number he would have reached her.

And said what?
Susie, I love you so much I don’t want you moving in with me,
or
My question Thursday night was merely one small step in a long journey, so if we don’t take that step, no big deal,
or
Ha, ha, just kidding!

“Tommy!” Sondra shouted through her open office door, snapping Susie back into the present. Yes,
Tommy
rhymed with
pastrami
, for what that was worth.

Simultaneously, from the open door next to Sondra’s office, Dierdre Morrissey called out, “Balmy.” Dierdre had been Susie’s father’s right-hand woman when he’d been alive. She still worked at Bloom’s, only now she’d
expanded her duties to serve as everybody’s right-hand woman.

“Swami,” Julia called through her open door.

“Economy,” Myron the accountant called through his.

A normal person might have wondered at the communication system of the Bloom’s third-floor offices. Everyone kept his or her door open and bellowed back and forth. No one ever used phones to talk to colleagues. They just hollered.

Susie just had her desk, not an office. Julia had wanted to give her one, but having an office would be too…official. She wrote the
Bloom’s Bulletin
and oversaw the store’s window and shelf displays, but if she had an office it would imply that her fancy title, creative director, actually signified something meaningful. She’d insisted that Julia give her a desk, a chair and a computer, period. The desk Julia had found for her stood nestled within a wall niche that had been created by protruding ventilation ducts. From her station, she could hear everything everyone shouted through his or her open door.

“Economy doesn’t rhyme with salami,” her mother objected.

“Sure it does,” Myron countered from the safety of his office. “If you accent it like economics, you can make it rhyme.
Eh
-cah-
nah
-mee.”

“No, Myron,” Dierdre vetoed him.

Susie sighed and leaned back in her chair, after looking both ways to make sure she wouldn’t knock into anyone walking behind her. Did other business offices operate this way? She didn’t have vast experience working in offices—to be sure, she’d never worked in one in her life, unless she counted doing her homework
in her mother’s office when she’d been a kid, and even then, she hadn’t really
worked
. She’d just blown through her assignments and raced downstairs so she could play in the store. Other children might not have considered a bustling, aromatic food emporium the greatest playground in the world, but Susie had always loved skipping up and down the aisles, rearranging products on the shelves so the boxes and jars would look more symmetrical or colorful, contriving to bump into rude customers and hanging around the bagel counter hoping for one of the countermen to recognize her and slip her a bagel.

Now, of course, she intended to stay as far from the bagel counter as she could. Casey worked there, just two floors down, distributing bagels, twisting ties around plastic bags, replenishing the bins, thanking the customers who praised his more outrageous bagel flavors and listening solemnly to those who had to tell him they honestly believed that adding a Dijon-mustard tang to bagel dough was sacrilegious.

If she hung around the bagel counter today, the tall, blond counterman was more likely to slip her the finger than to slip her a bagel.

“If you were from Jamaica,” Myron was yelling, “you’d say it
eh
-cah-
nah
-mee. Calypso-style.”

“And if you were from Weehawken, New Jersey, you’d say, ‘Up yours, buddy,’” Uncle Jay growled.

Susie sighed again. Not only weren’t other business offices like this, but other families weren’t like this. Uncle Jay’s supply of patience was usually about as big as a spider’s turd, but he generally targeted blood relatives for his petulance. Maybe Myron had been with Bloom’s long enough to be considered family. A slight, balding fellow partial to bow ties, he might well have
been sitting exactly where he was now when the Bloom Building was constructed, forcing the architects to build his office around him. Julia had confided to Susie that Myron’s bookkeeping methods were so archaic she was surprised he didn’t do his calculations on an abacus, but he was a sweet man and one of these days he’d retire. In the meantime, Julia said, he wasn’t doing any harm.

“Never mind,” Susie shouted. “I’ll come up with my own rhyme.” And she’d take as long as she could to do that, too. Eventually, she would have to go down to the store to interview Rita Martinez for an employee profile. A cashier, Rita had been with Bloom’s for five years, which made her the doyenne of Bloom’s checkout staff. But Susie was in no hurry to interview Rita. The longer she could put off running into Casey…

She was being ridiculous, of course. She couldn’t spend her life hiding from him—and why would she want to? She’d been away all weekend. He hadn’t tried to contact her. This was the way relationships fell apart: one weekend, one panic attack, one swearword at a time.

At least, she assumed that was the case. She’d known a lot of guys in her life, but she’d never really been in a
relationship
before, anything serious enough that its conclusion required breaking up.

And she hadn’t broken up with Casey, anyway. All she’d done was tell him she didn’t want to move in with him. If he couldn’t accept that, it was his problem.

She scrolled through everything she’d written for the new edition of the
Bloom’s Bulletin
. To the left of her keyboard was a stack of sales prices and specials she’d included in the flyer—writing wittily about discounts on marinated artichokes and marble halvah wasn’t as
difficult as coming up with limericks that had words like
pastrami
in them, but it wasn’t easy, either—and to her right was the artwork for the newsletter, photos of deli trays and line drawings of braided loaves. Uncle Jay did the scanning for her, but she had to plan the layout.

She could stare at the monitor for the next hour, trying to will into being a poem about a balmy swami named Tommy eating pastrami, or she could suck it up and march downstairs to interview Rita Martinez. Susie might be a lot of things—stupid, frivolous and reckless among them—but she wasn’t a coward. Drawing in a deep breath, she pushed away from her desk and stood.

She probably should have worn something more enticing, she mused, gazing down at the outfit she’d thrown on that morning: a black denim skirt and a black crocheted shell over a forest-green tank top. If Casey saw her, he’d think she was glum and morbid—or else he’d think she was dressed the way she always dressed, as if she’d bought her wardrobe after having her colors done by Morticia Addams. She really should stop wearing black all the time. She should probably get a personality transplant, too.

Taking another deep breath, she pushed her chair into the well of her desk and sauntered down the wide hall that doubled as a reception area for the offices, all of which opened onto it. A few cheaply framed Chagall prints featuring smiling, upside-down cows floating through pastel skies adorned the walls, and some ugly chairs that appeared to have been rejects from a dentist’s waiting room stood randomly around the carpeted floor, as if there might be such a long wait to see one of the third-floor employees that a person would need to rest his feet. Once through the office door, she
crossed the elevator vestibule and shoved open the stairwell door. She clomped down a flight, used her employee key to open the door into the store’s house-wares department, and moved past aisles lined with pots, pans, woks and fans, pepper mills and knife sharpeners, jar openers and nutcrackers, to the broad stairway that led down to the first floor. The stairway was lined with clocks, and their multitude of faces, all displaying different times, always unnerved her. Despite her reluctance to get to the first floor, she scampered down the stairs so she wouldn’t have to pay attention to all that tick-tocking time.

A row of cashier counters was located about twenty feet to her right at the foot of the stairs. But Rita and the other cashiers could have been on Uranus for all Susie noticed them. The instant the sole of her sandal touched the hardwood planks of the first floor, she spotted Casey. Damn the guy for not being behind the bagel counter, which was around the bend and not visible from the stairway. No, he had to be at large in the store, carrying a wrapped party platter of bagels to a well-dressed woman in a motorized wheelchair, which was idling near Rita Martinez’s checkout post.

Casey saw Susie, too. He froze in midstep, eyed her up and down, then proceeded to the woman in the wheelchair. He thoughtfully hunkered down to be eye level with her before speaking. No doubt he was saying all kinds of charming things. He was probably praising her taste in bagels, or her spiffy wheels. With him, it wasn’t sweet talk. It was just the way he was, attentive and kind.

Why couldn’t he be a schmuck?

She watched him straighten up and felt she had to do something. Standing immobile at the base of the
stairway like some new Bloom’s display for black fashions struck her as stupid, frivolous, reckless
and
cowardly. She forced herself to take a step—by which time his lanky legs had carried him the distance from the cashiers to her side. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” She gazed up into his pale, shimmering eyes and clamped her lips shut to keep from babbling. Those eyes had always done wild things to her. So had his height, his lean build, his softly waving blond hair and the intriguing hollows of his cheeks. Where Casey was concerned, her vision qualified as an erogenous zone.

If she opened her mouth, all her feelings would come tumbling out: that she missed him, that she adored him, that she wanted to lock lips and other body parts with him right this very instant—but no, she would not move to Queens. She was more than willing to give him her heart; he had no right to expect her to give him her life, too.

She swallowed repeatedly to keep the words down. He stared at her for a few long seconds, then asked, “How was your brother’s graduation?”