“Well, she’s a widow and he’s divorced,” Julia said into the phone. “And neither of them is in possession of a single cell of functional gray matter…. So talk to him. Tell him coming on to your future mother-in-law is not a wise idea…. No, you talk to him. He’s your father…. Why? Who the hell knows why? She hasn’t been on a date since my father died. That’s two years. And then your father shows up with that damn bouquet of flowers. The woman is obviously having a midlife crisis.”

  Julia listened a bit more, then exhaled wearily. “Okay. We’ll strategize tonight. I’ve got to go now. My sister is here. I’ve got to solve her crisis, too…. Right. Bye.” She hung up.

  “You don’t have to solve my crisis,” Susie said indignantly, although deep down she’d be overjoyed if Julia would do that.

  “I don’t even know what your crisis is,” Julia said, collapsing into her desk chair. It had been bought for their father, who, while not a huge man, had been nearly half a foot taller than Julia. The chair dwarfed her. Her feet didn’t quite touch the floor.

  “I don’t have a crisis,” Susie fibbed.

  “You phoned me Friday and said you’re leaving town.”

  “That’s not a crisis. That’s an opportunity.”

  “And you’re having nightmares about picket fences and alarm clocks. I think you should go into therapy.”

  Susie couldn’t tell if Julia was joking. She decided she didn’t care. Why should she waste time confiding in a therapist when she had Julia? “I like Casey. I probably even love him. I just don’t want to marry him. Is that a crime?”

  “So don’t marry him.”

  “He gave me an ultimatum. Either we go forward or we quit.”

  “So quit.”

  “But I like him.”

  “And you probably even love him.” Julia shook her head. “Days like today, I miss working at the law firm. I only had sixty-hour workweeks then, doing tons of tedious research and being grossly underpaid and underappreciated. It was a piece of cake compared with this.” She moved her arm in an arc that encompassed her office. Her hand landed on a folder on her desk. “Here are the sale items for this week’s bulletin. Are you planning to quit that, too?”

  “The Bloom’s Bulletin? And give up my fancy title, all that power, all the perks? No. I can do the bulletin on a laptop and e-mail it to you.”

  “How long will you be away?”

  “I’m not sure. It depends on Rick’s production schedule.”

  “Rick.” Julia mouthed a curse and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Another disaster. What kind of production schedule does he need? He’s making an infomercial.”

  “He’ll still need a schedule.”

  “He’s planning something elaborate, isn’t he?” Julia frowned. “Something with explosions and simulated sex.”

  “It’s about food,” Susie promised. “I don’t think there’s any sex in it.”

  “Does he have a script?”

  “He has…an idea.”

  “Shit.” Julia shook her head. “I never used to curse this much. Running Bloom’s has given me a bad case of potty-mouth.”

  “Maybe Joffe did that,” Susie said.

  “Ron gives me many things, but potty-mouth isn’t among them.” She slumped against the high back of the chair and eyed Susie wearily. “The only good thing about your running away to work on his movie is that you’ll be able to keep an eye on Rick. Will you do that? Will you keep the movie on track?”

  “I don’t know,” Susie said cagily. “That kind of responsibility…maybe you should give me a raise.”

  “Maybe I should give you a kick in the ass. You want your fancy title and your perks, you’ll make sure he makes a movie we can get some mileage out of. Uncle Jay talked me into giving him a twenty-five-thousand-dollar budget. I want my money’s worth—and it better not be artsy-fartsy dreck.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Susie promised.

  “Okay. Now, what about Casey?”

  What little pleasure she’d experienced from witnessing Julia’s torment over their mother’s hot date with Norman Joffe vanished. What about Casey? She liked him. She loved him. They’d broken up because she wouldn’t marry him. Julia’s tsurris with the wedding plans and Joffe’s father were nothing like the stabbing pain Susie felt whenever she thought about Casey.

  “Will you solve my crisis?” she asked plaintively.

  “There’s only one way to solve your crisis,” Julia told her. “Figure out what you want and then go for it.”

  Susie snorted at the simplistic advice. “Thanks, Ann Landers. Everything’s clear now.”

  “What do you want me to say?” Despite her stern tone, Julia rose from her chair, crossed to the sofa and looped her arms around Susie. “There’s no easy answer. If you were ready to get married, you’d get married. You’re not, so you won’t.”

  “Even if it means losing Casey?”

  “Figure out what you want, Susie,” Julia repeated. “If you don’t want to lose Casey, figure out a way not to lose him.”

  “This is getting a little too Zen for me,” Susie protested. “I already know a way not to lose him—marry him. If I do that, I lose myself.”

  “Om,” Julia chanted.

  Susie laughed, which was almost as good as having her crisis solved. “Okay, I’ll write your stupid newsletter,” she grunted, shoving to her feet and moving to the door. She swung it open in time to see Casey entering the reception area.

  He’d come upstairs to check with someone named Helen on the status of his Bloom’s pension. Helen was the Human Resources person. He’d never met her—she’d been hired a few months ago, when Susie’s sister had decided that the company needed to be run a bit more like a company—but he’d received a few chirpy, impersonal memos from her: “Hi! I’m Helen, the new head of Human Resources. If you have any questions about your employee benefits, let me know!” She never promised to answer those questions, but her memos had made an impression on him…all those happy exclamation points.

  Mose had suggested that he find out just how much money was stashed in his pension account and how much he could get his hands on. In addition, Mose had also suggested that if Casey chose to be so unrealistic that he wouldn’t at least consider opening his bread boutique in Queens, he could find himself another adviser. Also another best friend.

  Because best friends were hard to come by, Casey had spent most of the weekend convincing himself that setting up shop in Queens made a lot of sense. It would mean a shorter commute, for one thing. And a shorter commute meant more time to practice his shots on the court. His three-pointer still hadn’t come back to him.

  The downside of opening a business in Queens was that his parents would stop by all the time. Not to buy anything—they’d complain that his breads were too expensive, but they’d come in to see how he was doing. His father would lecture him on the opportunity he’d let slip through his fingers when he’d failed to capture the boss’s daughter, and Casey would remind him that Susie was the boss’s sister and his father would forget and refer to Susie as the boss’s daughter again before the conversation was over. His mother would pass him the phone numbers of unmarried lay teachers at the parish school and assure him he was better off finding himself a good Catholic girl. His sister might wander in, too, between dog-grooming appointments. She’d tell him the very concept of a bread store was pretentious, and then she’d pass him the phone numbers of unmarried lay teachers at the parish school.

  But the upside was that he could afford Queens. Depending on how much money was in his pension account.

  Susie worked on the third floor most Monday mornings. That fact had slipped his mind today, though, because she hadn’t pranced through the store to say hi to him—something she always used to do on Mondays except for those days that began in Queens because she’d slept over at his place Sunday night, which she could have been doing every night if she’d moved in with him. When he hadn’t seen her in the store that morning, he hadn’t given her absence much thought, other than the fact that she was absent from his entire life. That particular truth occupied a large chunk of his brain at all times, like a chronic sinus infection, achy and impossible to ignore.

  He saw her standing in the doorway of her sister’s office. She appeared pallid to him, her hair lacking its usual shine, her eyes circled in shadow, her maroon T-shirt and short black skirt hanging on her. Hell. It didn’t matter how drab she looked. Ever since the first time he’d seen her a year ago, when she’d stepped up to the bagel counter and he’d had no idea who she was, he’d savored the sight of her.

  If he opened his store in Queens, he might never see her again. That could work.

  “Casey,” Julia said, giving him a warm smile. Had Susie been smiling, her smile would have been as warm as a glacier on the darkest day of winter. Fortunately, she wasn’t smiling, so the only frostbite he felt came from her eyes and the tension in her mouth.

  “I was just leaving,” Susie said abruptly.

  “I’ve got to see Helen,” Casey said, not sure which Bloom sister he was telling this to.

  “You two have to talk,” Julia announced, overruling them both.

  “Julia…” Susie glared at her.

  “You want me to solve your crisis? Fine, I’ll solve it. You two have to go somewhere and talk.”

  “Where should we go? My office?” Susie snorted. Casey knew her “office” was just a desk that jutted out of a wall in the broad hallway. No way would he hang out in the hallway with her while they had this talk Julia was ordering them to engage in.

  “You can use my office,” Julia said magnanimously, stepping through the door and beckoning Casey with a wave.

  He didn’t want to use her office. He didn’t want to talk to Susie. He wanted to jump her bones, he wanted to hear her say he was right and she was wrong and she was sorry for being such a stubborn bitch, because she loved him with all her heart and longed to spend the rest of her life with him, but other than that he didn’t want to talk to her.

  Julia stood beside her open door, arms folded, smile growing smug. “Come on, Casey. She won’t bite.”

  “How do you know?” he retorted. In the heat of passion, Susie could get a little carried away.

  “In you go. Into the office.” Julia addressed him as if he were a three-year-old afraid to climb into the bathtub. He eyed Susie, who had backed deep into the office, leaving him a wide berth. Resigned, he followed her in.

  As soon as he crossed the threshold, Julia shut the door behind him. He’d been in this office before, but never with the door closed and never alone with Susie. His gaze circled the room in search of a safe place for him to sit. The sofa didn’t look too promising. Julia’s desk chair—well, that would be overstepping. Maybe he should just remain standing.

  Susie moved to the sofa and sat. “Julia can be so bossy sometimes,” she said.

  “She’s the boss. It comes with the territory.”

  “You’re pissed, aren’t you.”

  “Who, me?” he said sarcastically. “Why should I be pissed?”

  “I can’t marry you, Casey.” Her eyes sparked with energy. “I just can’t. I can’t live in a house with a picket fence.”

  “Who said anything about a picket fence? I’ve got an apartment on the fourth floor of a mock-Tudor building. Not a picket fence in sight.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Actually, he didn’t. About a third of the time, he had no idea what Susie meant. That had always been part of her appeal.

  She looked small and vulnerable seated on the sofa by herself. If he joined her there, he’d probably regret it. But he couldn’t bear the sight of her hunched over, her hands cupping her cheeks and her eyes so big and wistful.

  He’d done idiotic things before. What was one more idiotic thing? He walked over to the sofa and sat down beside her, leaving a couple of feet of space between them. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to talk about,” he said. “We’re at an impasse.”

  “This is what’s so great about you,” Susie said, tilting her head to peer at him. “You’re a bagel designer, but you use words like impasse in casual conversation.”

  “Is this a casual conversation?”

  “Caitlin took me to this movie Saturday night. It was really a series of videos, of androgynous Japanese rock stars licking one another.”

  Her non sequitur threw him momentarily. “Androgynous is a bigger word than impasse,” he finally said.

  She cracked a smile. A small one, but enough to remind him of how much he wanted her in his life. “What did you do Saturday night?”

  “Nothing worth mentioning.” At her questioning glance, he elaborated. “Nothing at all.”

  “Can’t we just go back to the way things were before?” she asked plaintively.

  He thought about it, thought hard. Thought about the way things had been. Long, tiring subway rides between her place and his. Sleeping with her in the living room of her apartment while her roommates slept in the bedroom, and rushing through sex in case one of them wandered out to get a glass of water. Or Susie at his place, whining about how Queens was too quiet and boring. Endless phone conversations, trying to figure out where to meet, where to go, where to end the night. Too many nights ended alone.

  When he was eighteen or twenty or twenty-four, he wouldn’t have minded. He was twenty-seven, though, planning to start his own business and ready to stop being a kid. He’d asked Susie to marry him and she’d said no. How could they go back?

  He shook his head. A large tear rolled down her cheek, big enough to dissolve everything inside him. He’d never seen her cry. “Come on, Susie. Don’t.”

  “I want to be with you, Casey. I just don’t want to marry you. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

  Because it made no sense, that was why. Because when people wanted to be together, the easiest, most efficient way to go about it was marriage. Or at least living together, creating a home, making a commitment.

  But she was crying, and he had to do something. Aware that it was a huge mistake, but unable to stop himself, he arched his arm around her. She slid toward him and leaned against his shoulder.

  She didn’t erupt into full-fledged sobs. It didn’t matter; the damage had been done. He had Susie in the curve of his arm, pressed up against him, and the possibility of his ever letting go of her seemed absurdly remote.

  She nestled into him, apparently as content to be held as he was to be holding her. And damn it, her head was too close, her hair brushing his chin. All he had to do was tip his face down to kiss the crown of her head.

  “Casey,” she whispered, angling her face up so he could kiss her mouth, instead. He did. Joy blew through him like a hot wind. Too many miserable days had passed since he’d last kissed her—and that time, they’d been standing on the stairway landing, and the kiss had gone nowhere because she’d said no.

  She was going to say no again, but for just this one minute he could pretend things were different. He kissed her as if his existence depended upon it, as if his life was riding on the pressure of her lips and the jabs of her tongue. He kissed her as if they were in an inflatable lifeboat on a stormy sea and their kiss was necessary to keep the boat from deflating. He kissed her as if she’d said yes.

  She sank back until she was lying on the couch, and pulled him down with her. At another time, he might have had second thoughts about sprawling out on top of her on an old sofa in his boss’s office. But right now he was still sailing along in that little inflatable dinghy, the yes boat, and he didn’t care.

  He felt her hands between their bodies, working the knot holding the waist tie of his apron shut. His own hands roamed her body, petite but strong, every curve and surface as familiar to him as the house he’d grown up in. When he reached her skirt he kept going, groping for the hem and shoving it up her legs. She abandoned the waist tie of his apron and shoved the front flap up. It bunched between their bellies, but that wrinkle of fabric didn’t feel anywhere near as uncomfortable as the hard-on pressing painfully against his fly.

  Her fingers reached for his zipper. “Susie,” he warned.

  “I know,” she mumbled, then kissed him again and slid the zipper down.

  Once again, he had no idea what she meant. But he had a pretty clear idea what she was doing with her hands, and he couldn’t find it in him to resist. He wedged a finger inside her panties and she was so wet he nearly came just from the feel of her.

  “I know,” she said again, wiggling her hips to help him strip off her panties. Once they were down to her knees, she contorted one leg until it slid free of the leg hole, then shoved Casey’s jeans down past his butt and urged her to him.

  One of the greatest moments in his relationship with her had occurred on New Year’s Eve, after they’d left some weirdo nightclub in Alphabet City and returned to her apartment to discover neither of her roommates was back from Times Square yet. They’d appropriated the bedroom, locking the door so Anna and Caitlin couldn’t barge in on them, and stripped naked, and when he’d reached for a rubber she’d said, “Casey, we’ve been together for so long. I’m on the Pill, and I’m not screwing around, and I don’t think you are, either. I trust you.” And he’d made love to her, skin to skin, human to human instead of penis to plastic.

  They were human to human today, Casey to Susie, two lovers who’d been apart for too long. It was hot, it was fast, his damn apron and her skirt were in the way, he hadn’t even touched her breasts, and she was already coming before he found his rhythm, her amazing body pulsing around him, every spasm daring him to let go.

  He did. No sense going for style points. This was a desperation fuck, and that realization smacked him as fiercely as his own climax—and as suddenly as a vision of babies. For the first time since she’d told him to stop using condoms, he imagined making a baby with her. He imagined that baby being born—his blond hair, her dark eyes, tiny but with big feet, indicating the potential for basketball-star proportions by the time the kid had passed through adolescence. He imagined Susie nursing their baby, and he imagined himself playing with it, and even changing its diapers, and pushing a stroller on long walks with his wife through Flushing Meadows Park…and going home to a house surrounded by a picket fence.