Love in Bloom's (16 page)

“Casey. He works in bagels. You’re probably going to lay him off.”

“No, I’m not. But maybe you can help him to revive the department. Or you can drag him off to the supply closet and screw him during your lunch break. I don’t care, Susie. I need your creativity to give the store some spark. I haven’t got a creative bone in my body. I need you.”

Every day with Casey. Either he’d flee from her or he’d let her screw him in the supply closet—she’d have to find out where one was located—or they’d continue their strange relationship, munching on bagels and sipping coffee and arguing whether the world would have been a better place if Woody Allen had never heard of Ingmar Bergman.

She supposed that seeing him every day, for as long as it took her to redesign the windows at Bloom’s—because she wasn’t going to commit to anything more than that—would make working in the family business bearable.

“Okay,” she said, reaching for the last wedge of orange. “Okay, I’ll do the windows. Now, tell me some more about this sexy reporter from
Gotham Magazine
.”

C
alling a meeting was a power thing. At Griffin, McDougal, associates never called meetings. They didn’t have the clout. If they wanted a meeting, they had to ask a partner to call one. It was a rigid hierarchical process, and Julia had always resented it, even though she herself had never had any reason to call a meeting. She’d thought the rule was silly, and she’d muttered that if ever she were in charge, she’d do away with such nonsense.

But here she was, the president of Bloom’s, calling a meeting. She was in charge. Authority pulsed through her, intoxicating and scary. What if everyone resented her the way she’d resented the partners who called meetings at Griffin, McDougal?

She had hoped Adam would be able to come down from Cornell for her meeting, partly because he was a math whiz—Myron Finkel still seemed to prefer his sixties-era adding machine to a calculator, so someone with a more modern approach to crunching numbers might offer a desperately needed per
spective—but mostly for moral support, because he was family and Bloom’s was a family matter. She’d telephoned him at his dorm over the weekend. His roommate had answered the phone, and when he’d gone to find Adam she’d heard Phish music playing in the background. This had reassured her; she associated Phish with more benign drugs than, say, Korn. She did wish bands that named themselves after foods would learn how to spell.

Adam had eventually found his way to the phone. She’d told him about her leave of absence from the law firm and her decision to become the de facto president of Bloom’s, and he’d said that was cool. She’d explained that Bloom’s might not be in the greatest of fiscal health, and he’d said that was cool, too. Adam wanted to be a college professor when he grew up. It was as close as he could get to spending the rest of his life living in a dorm and playing Phish—and possibly indulging in benign drugs, although Julia didn’t want to explore that particular subject with him.

“So I’m going to hold a meeting. We’re going to air some dirty linen,” she’d told him.

“That sounds cool.”

“And I thought, as one of Dad’s children, you might want to be there.”

“I can’t, Julia. I’ve got midterms coming up.”

She wondered if he considered midterms cool.

So all right, she would hold her meeting without Adam. She’d have Susie there, at least. And Deirdre, who wasn’t anyone’s blood relation. And Grandma Ida. Either Julia’s meeting would be a triumph or it would be a debacle.

She considered starting her morning with two doughnuts for extra energy and a desperately needed sugar high, but then came up with a better idea. This was Bloom’s, after all. People ought to have enough faith in what they were selling to eat it.

She entered the store at nine a.m. and headed straight for the bagel counter. Susie’s friend was there, a natty white apron tied
around his waist and his hair pulled into a ponytail. “Hey,” he said, giving her a smile. “I know you, don’t I?”

“I’m Susie Bloom’s sister,” Julia said. “Julia Bloom.”

“Right!”

He wasn’t movie-star material, and he didn’t make her heart pound like drums along the Mohawk, but he was cute in a cheerful, gangly way.

“Julia! Hi! How’s Susie?”

“She’s going to be here later. You can ask her yourself. After my meeting,” she added, surveying the bagels in the bins. “How fresh are these?”

“I pulled them out of the oven a half hour before opening time.”

“And you have…what are those,
pesto
bagels?”

“They’re a big seller.”

She suppressed a shudder. How many people could possibly want to buy pesto bagels? If they were a big seller, that could explain why the bagel department numbers were weird. “Well. Here’s what I want—an assortment of bagels on a platter. Do you have a platter?”

“A cardboard tray,” he suggested, displaying for her a textured tray that looked like dried concrete.

“Let me see if we have something nicer,” she said, then sprinted to the second floor and scoured the kitchenware department for something to serve the bagels on that would look better than dried concrete. She found a round plastic tray with a Star of David embossed at the center of it. Perhaps it would lend a certain holy flavor to her meeting.

She carried the tray downstairs to the bagel counter. “Give me a nice selection, okay, Casey? A dozen bagels in all. And can you slice them in half for me?”

“Not a problem.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“Should I include a couple of pestos?”

“One should be enough.” More than enough, she thought. “I’ll be back.”

She made her way back upstairs to the kitchenware department, found an insulated coffee decanter and returned to the first floor, this time heading for the coffee department. “Please fill this up with breakfast blend,” she requested.

She scooped a handful of half-and-half creamers into her shopping basket, then helped herself to several tubs of flavored cream cheese and grabbed a few wooden cream-cheese spreaders—which looked like mutant tongue depressors—from a cup near the heat-n-eat counter.

Returning to the bagel counter, she found that Casey had prepared an attractively shaped mound of bagels and wrapped the tray in clear plastic. “Excellent,” she said, beaming. Had he slept with Susie yet? she wondered. Susie clearly desired him, and as a rule she threw herself at anyone she desired. Had they consummated their relationship after the seder? A little matzo, a little nookie?

She didn’t have the guts to ask Susie, let alone Casey. She
was
going to ask Susie, one of these days, how she managed to treat sex so cavalierly. Not that Julia was envious, not that she intended to emulate her sister, but when a man came along who pushed one’s buttons and pulled one’s chain…

Julia didn’t have any particular man in mind, of course.

A full seven days had passed since Ron Joffe had pressed his lips to hers. He hadn’t called since then, hadn’t requested a second interview, hadn’t sent her a dozen red roses—which would have been a very nice gesture under the circumstances—or in any other way acknowledged that he’d kissed her in her office last week.

Shaking off the vague dismay that enveloped her whenever she thought about him, she lugged her basket to the nearest checkout line. Ahead of her stood a boxy gray-haired lady paying for a jar of sesame butter. “This stuff is supposed to increase my life span,” she snarled at the cashier. “If I die, I expect a full refund.”

“No problem,” the cashier said, barely disguising a yawn.

The woman pocketed her credit card and stormed off. Julia
settled her basket on the counter. “I’m Julia Bloom, the president of Bloom’s,” she told the cashier.

The young woman’s eyes widened. “
Ay!
I’m sorry I didn’t answer that lady right. I know, we don’t refund stuff just because someone dies.”

“You handled her fine,” Julia assured the young woman. “I’m going to establish an account so we can get Bloom’s coffee and bagels upstairs in the offices. I’m not sure how to do that. I’ll have to work it out.” She was the flipping president—she could work it out any way she wanted.

“So, you want me to, like, ring this up, or you just wanna take it?”

“Ring it up.” She couldn’t set a precedent of having people walk out of the store with unpaid-for platters of bagels. She’d pay for the feast with her credit card and then set up an account to reimburse herself. A petty-cash account or something, so the third-floor staff could get coffee from downstairs whenever they wanted it. Clerks and cashiers ought to be able to get free coffee, too, she thought.

And she was going to run the store into bankruptcy if she wasn’t careful.

She pocketed her receipt. Then, hooking the bag with the cream cheese and creamers over her wrist and balancing the decanter atop the peak of the bagel mountain, she exited through the back door to the elevator. She arrived at her office to find Susie already there, waiting for her.

“You don’t have a conference room, do you,” Susie said accusingly.

“I’ve got a couch in my office. We can drag in some chairs. You can sit on the floor.” Since Susie was wearing her black denim overalls, it didn’t seem like an outlandish suggestion. She handed the platter and decanter to Susie and dug her office key from the pocket of her blazer. “Casey’s downstairs. He asked how you were.”

“What did you tell him?” Susie sounded a touch anxious.

Shoving the door open with her hip, Julia lifted the coffee
and the bag of cream cheese from the tray. “I told him you’d run off with a lesser European prince. What do you think?”

“A
lesser
prince? Why not a top-of-the-line prince?” Susie followed Julia into the office. “How did he look?”

“He looked like he looked at Grandma Ida’s seder, only with an apron on. After the meeting you can go downstairs and ogle him if you’d like. You’re going to be working downstairs, anyway.”

“
If
I agree to work for you,” Susie warned. “I don’t know anything about redesigning stores, Julia.”

“You design the window at Nico’s,” Julia reminded her. “That’s all you need to know. How big a difference can there be between Italian and Jewish windows?”

“You want original poetry in Bloom’s windows?”

“I want the windows themselves to be poetry. Here comes Mom,” she added in a tight voice as she shaped her mouth into a smile.

Sondra Bloom seemed disgruntled by Julia’s decision to call a meeting. Julia could tell this by the clench of her mother’s teeth behind her glossy lips.

“Hello, girls!” she said, spreading her arms to gather them in. Belatedly, she noticed that they were carrying brunch. “So we’re going to have a meeting! This is so exciting.”

She said it with the gusto one would use to describe a sinus infection. Rather than respond, Julia arranged the food on the coffee table. She pulled the plastic wrap off the bagels and stared with mild consternation at the selection Casey had chosen. One of the bagels had a pink hue to it.

“Cranberry,” Susie whispered, evidently figuring out what Julia was gaping at. “Casey told me they’re delicious.”

Uncle Jay followed Sondra through the door, and Julia began to wonder whether maybe her office wasn’t as big as she’d thought it was. Susie helpfully hoisted herself to sit on Grandpa Isaac’s desk, leaving the sofa and the chairs for others. Deirdre stalked in on her porn-star high heels. Myron trudged in in his worn oxfords and immediately pounced on the bagels, grab
bing the cranberry one for himself. Who would have thought he’d be so daring?

“Let’s get this meeting started,” Jay said brusquely. “Some of us have work to do.”

“And others of us want to go play golf,” Sondra murmured, shooting him a skeptical look. “I think it’s very nice that my daughter prepared this spread for us. She’s such a good hostess.”

Julia glanced through the open door, hoping Grandma Ida would arrive. Telephoning Grandma Ida last night to ask her to attend had taken a significant amount of courage. “A meeting? You want a meeting? What for?” she’d asked.

Although she’d been far from encouraging about the meeting, she did say she would come. And finally, ten minutes past the scheduled starting time, she stepped out of the elevator at the opposite end of the hallway, her hand hooked through the bend in Lyndon’s arm. Together they strode down the hall like a mismatched bride and groom, until they reached Julia’s office.

“
Nu…
so everybody’s here?” Grandma Ida asked, glowering at the room’s occupants.

“Now that you’re here, everybody’s here,” Julia said, her palms growing cold and slick. Oh God. She had called a meeting, and she was going to have to run it. When she’d been reveling in her power, she’d forgotten to take into account the huge responsibility that came with it. “Grandma, why don’t you sit on the couch.” She motioned for her mother to make room.

Lyndon helped her onto the couch. “Do you want me to stay?” he asked Julia.

“Yes,” Grandma Ida answered. She turned to Julia. “If I decide I don’t like it, he can get me out of here.”

“I can get you out of here, too,” Uncle Jay noted.

Grandma Ida ignored him. “What’s with all this food?”

“It’s from downstairs,” Julia said, bracing for an attack. “If we’re going to sell food at Bloom’s, we ought to have enough faith in it to eat it ourselves.”

“It’s too expensive,” Grandma Ida grumbled.

Julia opened her mouth to argue, but Susie gave a slight shake of her head and Julia heeded her sister’s unspoken counsel. No sense arguing with Grandma Ida before the meeting had even begun. “Okay,” she said, gesturing Deirdre toward one of the chairs and Lyndon toward another. Perched on the desk and swinging her legs, Susie looked more comfortable than they did. “I’m the president of Bloom’s, and we have some problems.”

“Why is Susie here?” Uncle Jay asked. He gave Susie a beaming proud-uncle smile that had all the authenticity of nondairy whipping cream, then glared at Julia.

“I’ve commissioned Susie to help redesign the store,” Julia announced. “Starting with the windows,” she added, but she doubted anyone heard her through all the exclamations.

“Redesigning?”

“So what’s wrong with the way the store looks now?”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Are these cranberries in this bagel?”

This was not an auspicious start to her meeting. Julia wished she had a gavel. Lacking one, she clapped her hands.

Everyone turned to her. Good. She had power, the power of the clap—and it alarmed her a little. Maybe she ought to license her hands as weapons.

“We need to make some changes here,” she said.

“It didn’t occur to you that Rick could redesign the store?” Uncle Jay challenged.

“He’s a filmmaker,” Julia said, generously stretching the truth.

“He’s visual.” Uncle Jay jabbed a finger toward his eye. “He thinks in visuals. Why Susie and not him?”

“Susie has experience designing windows,” Julia explained, then hurried ahead. “I don’t want to start by talking about design. I want to talk about the fact that Bloom’s has been in a rut for a long time, and our earnings aren’t what they ought to be. No one has questioned what works and what doesn’t work. We’ve had innovations introduced by Uncle Jay,” she noted,
nodding in his direction. He subsided and poured himself some coffee, his mouth pinched. “But we’ve got departments that are stagnant. Departments that are losing money. Bloom’s needs an overhaul.”