Blooming All Over (27 page)

“I’m not a Bloom,” Dierdre said quietly, staring at Sondra with steely green eyes, “but I think you’re wrong.”

“You
would
think I’m wrong,” Sondra retorted. “And guess what? Your judgment means nothing to me.”

“Sondra,” Uncle Jay intervened.

“Like
you
have anything worthwhile to add,” Sondra said, twisting on the couch to face Uncle Jay. “Your son is out God knows where, burning through the store’s money to make a cinematic masterpiece—”

“It’s going to be good,” Susie noted.

“Feh,”
Grandma Ida interjected. “Alfred Hitchcock, now, he’s good.”

Lyndon cleared his throat. “You may not be aware of this,” he said, “but the roof of this building is accessible. It’s got an attractive safety railing and a solid flooring. I bet a tent could be raised there.”

“On the roof of the Bloom Building?”

“I’ve been up there. Someone’s set up some picnic tables and a beach umbrella.”

“Who?” Sondra looked shocked. “Isn’t that trespassing?”

“I’ve been up there, too,” Susie said. “When we were kids, Rick and I used to go there all the time. The ground is kind of tarry, though, isn’t it?”

“You went up on the roof?” Sondra shrieked. “You could have fallen! You could have killed yourself!”

“It’s a really sturdy railing,” Susie assured her.

“How come you never took me up there?” Adam
asked. He was practically pouting. “I want to see the roof.”

“You could probably lay a parquet down for dancing,” Lyndon suggested. “Bring up a tent, tables, chairs and parquet and you’re on your way.”

Julia’s stomach began to unclench. The roof—with a view of the Hudson River and the sky stretching overhead. Fresh air, room to move, room to dance. They might need to get a permit; even though the Bloom family owned the building, she’d want to make sure holding a party up there was safe and legal. If it was, if she could arrange it, she and Ron could exchange vows beneath the stars. Well, beneath a
chupah,
but the
chupah
would be beneath the stars.

“Does the elevator go up to the roof?” she asked.

“The service elevator goes up to an anteroom that opens out onto the roof,” Lyndon told her. “You could cart everything up there without any trouble. Then you could reserve the service elevator for your guests. If people can reserve it to move in and out of apartments, I don’t see why you couldn’t claim it for an evening.”

The roof. The roof of the Bloom Building, with Bloom’s food and Blooms and music. “Lyndon, I love you,” she said.

“You’ve mentioned that in the past,” he said, grinning slyly. “But it won’t work, Julia. Stay with Ron. He’s a good man.”

Julia returned his smile. Indeed, everyone seemed to be smiling except her mother. “The roof of this building is not the Plaza,” she grumbled.

“No,” Julia said happily. “It’s not.”

A shadow fell across the room, and she looked toward the door. Ron stood there, slightly windblown and out of breath. “I got your message,” he said. “I was
doing an interview with a marketing professor up at Columbia, so…” He gazed around the room. “What did I miss?”

“We’re getting married on the roof,” Julia told him, pushing away from her desk and striding across the room to wrap her arms around him.

He kissed her forehead with a minimum of passion, in deference to the rapt audience watching them, and gazed into her eyes. “The roof? Do I have to parachute onto it?”

“No. There’s an elevator.”

He smiled and kissed her again, this time on her lips and a little less timidly. “Sounds great,” he said.

For her first meeting, Susie hadn’t done half-bad.

She had Julia’s office to herself. Julia and Joffe had gone upstairs to check out the building’s roof—and if it met with their approval, she’d consider the meeting an unqualified success, despite the fact that her mother was still fuming. Plaza, schmaza. Sondra would get over her snit. Or if she didn’t, she’d be the one to suffer because of it.

Susie was not going to suffer from her mother’s snit. She wasn’t going to suffer from Julia’s wedding. She had her own suffering to attend to, and as she lifted the many pieces of her poem from the pizza box, she found plenty of suffering in the words she’d written. On a small paper plate she’d inscribed:

She’d placed only one word,
alone
, at the center of a paper plate. She’d turned a half-used order pad into a flip book, with the word
home
printed first in tiny letters and then large ones, progressing from page to page until the word took up an entire order slip, and then, on the last few pages, the four letters that spelled
home
broke apart, so if she flipped through the pad, the word seemed to grow bigger and bigger until it burst.

On a paper towel, she’d written,
Home is not a flip book
.

On a waxed-paper sheet, she’d written,
Home is
…and then another word, which she couldn’t make out because her pen hadn’t worked well on the waxy surface.

Home is
…what? she wondered. What had that last word been?

The ink had bled a bit on the toilet-paper squares, which were filled with screeds about how a woman didn’t need a man if she had a dildo and an adequate supply of chocolate. Susie considered throwing those out, but she didn’t want Julia—or, more likely, the janitorial service—to find them in the trash basket. She piled them into a gauzy stack on one side of the box, figuring she could flush them down the toilet. Male-bashing rants weren’t what this poem was about.

It was about love, she thought, or more accurately, the end of love, the heartbreak of love, the loss of love. Her gaze drifted back to that waxed-paper sheet.
Home is
…

What the hell was home? A peanut-butter-and-fluff sandwich in a cabin by a scummy pond? An overcrowded walk-up in the East Village? Someplace with a white picket fence? A kosher-style food emporium on
the Upper West Side? Was it a place that stayed the same, no matter how far a person traveled, or was it a place that changed every day?

Bloom’s wasn’t the same place it had been a year ago, or even yesterday. Casey’s apartment had a six-foot-tall lobster in it, where once it had had no lobster. Everything stayed the same in Grandma Ida’s apartment—yet she’d been willing to host Julia’s wedding there.

Susie shifted plates, napkins and the box around on the desk, hoping to find a unifying concept in the words she’d written last night. She was convinced this was the most important poem she’d ever crafted, but she couldn’t seem to put it together. Strange that overseeing a meeting with a bunch of Blooms had been easier than overseeing a collection of paper scraps and jottings.

Julia reentered her office alone, her hair windswept and her smile brighter than a halogen bulb. “The roof is fantastic,” she said. “Even if it rains, there’s plenty of room for a tent. We have to work out the details with the building’s management, but if they say it’s okay, it’ll be a great place to have the wedding.”

“Why wouldn’t they say it’s okay? You own the building.”

“It’s owned by a family trust,” Julia corrected her.

“Same thing.” Susie shrugged. She didn’t understand the convolutions of the family’s assets. She just knew that she got a small check every month that made it possible for her to afford her share of the rent on that third-floor walk-up she wasn’t sure qualified as home.

“What’s all that?” Julia gestured toward the papers scattered across Grandpa Isaac’s desk. “Are you picking through the garbage at Nico’s?”

“It’s the poem,” Susie said, nudging the drinking-straw wrapper so it was half hidden under the box. “I’m trying to organize it. I’ve got to flush some of it, though.”

“Flush it?”

“Promise you won’t touch it,” Susie said, collecting the pile of toilet-paper squares. “Promise you won’t read it. It’s not ready yet.”

Julia pursed her lips. “I wouldn’t touch it without putting on latex gloves first. I don’t want to go near it.”

“Good. I’ll be back.” Susie strode to the door, gave Julia an encouraging smile and exited into the hall, exactly as Casey exited into the hall from the office where Helen, the Human Resources person, held court.

Amazing how simply seeing him could cause the back of Susie’s neck to grow steamy. Just ten paces behind her was the couch on which she and Casey had made love for the final time. She’d been feeling kind of pumped since she’d taken Rick and Anna’s advice and started work on her pizza-box magnum opus, but seeing Casey deflated her like a tack puncturing a tire. She remembered the last time she’d seen him: her idiotic drive to his apartment in the middle of the night, her granting him custody of Linus and then running away. She was lucky he hadn’t called the city’s department of mental health to report that a crackpot was harassing him.

“Susie,” he said, his gaze traveling from her face to the fluttering stack of toilet-paper squares in her hand.

“I have to flush this,” she explained—as if that would reassure him of her sanity.

“We need to talk.”

“Now?”

“It’s a more reasonable hour than the last time we talked.”

She couldn’t deny that. Stuffing the toilet paper into a pocket of her jeans, she accompanied him through the hall and out of the office suite, then into the stairwell and down two flights of stairs to the first-floor landing.

This was
their
spot. The place where they’d first kissed. The place where they’d had some of their most important conversations. Could a stairway landing be a home? Susie wondered. This one, with its echoing walls and too-bright lighting, was probably as close as she and Casey would ever come to sharing a home.

He turned her to face him and she stared up at him, ordering herself not to let the steamy sensation journey from her nape to other parts of her anatomy. Her body ignored that mental command and grew warm and soft for him. Her cheeks flushed with heat; she wondered if they were as red as Linus.

As if he’d read her mind, he asked, “Are you going to explain the lobster to me?”

“What were you doing on the third floor?” she retorted. “Handing in your resignation?”

He opened his mouth and then shut it, evidently weighing his answer. He must have decided that she deserved an honest response. “I’ll be here through the end of the month, but I need my pension money now.”

“Why?”

“For my new place.” He gazed past her for a second, then refocused on her. “I guess I need to tell you this. My store is going to be in your neighborhood. It’s on Avenue B at Fourth Street.”

“Great. I’ll be sure to stop in every day,” she retorted.

He ignored her sarcasm. “Bring your friends. I’ll need the business.”

She noticed a flicker of worry in his hazel eyes. Besides all the other emotions tangled into the world’s largest string ball inside her, she still felt concern for Casey. She wanted him to be happy. She wanted things to work out for him. She despised him and wished him a lifetime of pain and suffering, but she wasn’t quite done loving him yet, so she wished him good things, too. “Is your store going to succeed?”

“I sure as hell hope so.” He sighed, then smiled slightly. “Mose helped me get a low-interest loan from the Small Business Administration, and I’ve scraped the rest of the financing together. My pension funds are part of that. Your sister…”

“My sister what?” If Julia was part of his financing, too—if she’d invested in his business—Susie would have the building’s roof condemned so Julia would have to have her damn wedding at the Plaza. Or else she’d loosen a stretch of that sturdy railing and give Julia a well-timed shove.

“Your sister agreed to contract out to me as a bagel supplier. I’ll still be making all the bagels for Bloom’s. So there’ll be some income from that. And if you come in every day, and bring your friends…Yeah, it might succeed.”

She hated that he was smiling. He was too sexy when he smiled. She also hated that a part of her longed to clap her hands and cheer at the prospect of his business thriving. She hated that his eyes were too beautiful and he had that dusty-sweet flour scent, and he was so tall, and she’d kissed him here on this landing more than once, kissed him with enough heat to detonate a nuclear
device, kissed him with such joy she didn’t have to question the meaning of home. Home had been kissing Casey, and now she was homeless.

“She’s very pretty,” she said, reminding herself of why she would never kiss him again.

His smile vanished. “Who?”

“The woman at your apartment.”

He rolled his eyes, as if disgusted that she’d even mention it. Oh, right. He was sleeping with Halle Berry and Susie was supposed to pretend that didn’t have anything to do with her.

He dragged her back to his original question. “What the hell was the other night about? You showed up, you dumped a big synthetic lobster on me and you disappeared.”

“Because you were entertaining,” she explained. “I should’ve called first—”

“Agreed.”

“But I couldn’t find a parking space for the van in my neighborhood, so I figured I’d drive out to Forest Hills.”

“To give me a lobster?”

“Uh-huh.” She struggled to find the logic in her actions. The night she’d handed Linus over to him, it had seemed like a wise move.

“Why?”

“Because…” Because she’d wanted to tell him she loved him. Because she’d found the courage to toss aside everything she’d believed about herself, everything that mattered. And then she’d seen Halle and realized how foolish it was for her—for any woman—to sacrifice everything she believed about herself and everything that mattered for the love of a man. “Because
I couldn’t fit the lobster in my apartment, and Rick couldn’t fit it in his,” she said.

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Dip it in melted butter,” she snapped. “You’re the culinary genius. You figure it out.”