Grandma Ida’s apartment was a place where Julia could never escape from her memories. The mirror above the mantel—she recalled with pride the day she was finally tall enough to see the top of her head in it. The wide windows overlooking Broadway, where she and Susie would press their noses to the glass and count how many yellow taxis zoomed below them. The pink depression-glass candy dish that Susie used to perch upside down on her head and say, “Look! A yarmulke!” The meandering route that Adam used to steer his Tonka dump trucks around the legs of chairs and tables until Grandma Ida would snap, “Nu, does this look like a highway to you? Go play in the hall.”

  No Tonka dump trucks littered the floor today; no young children played here. Julia hesitated in the doorway as an image flashed before her of her own baby, hers and Ron’s, crawling across the rug, seeing teddy bears and Grinches in its fading patterns. The vision brought tears to her eyes—whether of joy or panic she couldn’t say—and she hastily blinked it away and marched into the room, beaming a smile at her grandmother and her aunt. Grandma Ida was ensconced in her favorite armchair, dressed in her usual dowdy but comfortable apparel—A-line skirt, cotton blouse, leather oxfords and gold bangle bracelets circling her wrists. Her hair was a cloud even darker than Aunt Martha, so black it sucked light out of the room.

  Aunt Martha looked like a superannuated Girl Scout in browns and khakis, white socks and Birkenstock sandals, a braided cord of leather around her neck and her long, lumpy salt-and-pepper hair held back in a clip. She returned Julia’s smile, although her smile was clearly ambivalent. It always was. She didn’t do happy very well.

  “Hello, Julia,” she said in her glum, gravelly voice. “How are things at the store?”

  “Fine,” Julia answered, latching onto an idea. “Actually, Aunt Martha, I came upstairs to discuss the store with Grandma. I’ve got only a few minutes, and we need to talk shop.”

  Aunt Martha was gloomy but she wasn’t dense. “Oh, of course. I wouldn’t dream of interfering. I came by just to drop off this book I think your grandmother will enjoy.” She gestured toward a hardcover tome lying on the coffee table. Julia lifted it and read the title: Broads of the Bible: A Feminist Trades Jabs with God. “A friend of mine from the Women’s Center recommended it. I found the book absorbing.”

  “I don’t know why you think I’d like it,” Grandma Ida barked, refusing to join the smile-fest Julia and Aunt Martha were caught up in. “I don’t like that word broads. It’s like what truck drivers say.”

  “The book is supposed to be humorous,” Aunt Martha explained dolefully. Her idea of humorous was probably anything that didn’t make a person want to drink Drano.

  “It’s full of jokes? A book that big, I’m supposed to laugh? I can hardly pick it up. My arthritis.” Grandma Ida lifted her hands and her bangles clinked.

  “Just have a look at it, Ida,” Aunt Martha urged her as she rose from the sofa. “I think you’ll be surprised.”

  “I’m too old to be surprised,” Grandma Ida muttered.

  Aunt Martha didn’t seem to hear her. She started toward the door, pausing to give Julia a hug en route. “How’s your mother?”

  Julia was not about to discuss her mother’s current insanity with anyone. “She’s fine,” she lied. “I’ll give her your regards.”

  “Please do. I’ve got to have her over for tea. I’ve discovered these wonderful cakes made out of red bean curd. They’re Chinese. I bet she’ll love them.”

  “I’m sure she will,” Julia agreed, realizing she’d have to steer her mother clear of Aunt Martha at least until she stopped acting like an infatuated schoolgirl and babbling about the magnificent time she’d spent having coffee with Norman Joffe. Actually, it had been magnificent in only some of the tellings. In others it had been glorious, delightful and so much fun. Norman was such a gentleman. He was so soft-spoken. He was so generous—he’d insisted that she order the double latte, and he’d practically forced a raspberry scone upon her, which implied that he didn’t think she was too fat—and he was very smart, he knew so much about tax preparation, and he hadn’t said a single negative thing about his ex-wife, which Julia’s mother considered fabulously discreet. She could see where Ron had come from, such a wonderful young man. He’d obviously inherited a lot of genes from his father.

  If Julia remembered her high-school biology better, she could determine exactly how many genes Ron had inherited from his father. The number wasn’t important now, though. What was important was to keep her mother from doing something seriously inconvenient, like falling in love with Ron’s father.

  In the meantime, until she was positive her mother was immune to anything as stupid as love, Julia had to keep her from running into anyone she might babble to. Norman Joffe might be the epitome of discretion, but Sondra Bloom was not.

  Aunt Martha lumbered out of the living room. Julia waved at her back, then settled onto the couch, deliberately sitting one cushion over from where Aunt Martha had sat. She heard Aunt Martha and Lyndon chatting in the entry, and then the front door swinging open and shut.

  “That woman is an idiot,” Grandma Ida announced.

  “She’s not so bad,” Julia argued, lifting the book. The weight strained her wrist. Were there really so many jabs to be traded between a feminist and God? Julia wasn’t overly religious, but she suspected that God could win such a bout in well under a hundred pages. Under fifty, if he put his all into it.

  “So? What did you want to see me about?” Grandma Ida asked, clasping her gnarled fingers together and staring at Julia with piercingly clear eyes.

  Julia inhaled. A year ago she would have been intimidated by her grandmother’s relentless gaze and crotchety attitude, but she’d spent a year running Bloom’s and discovering that she was a woman with great intelligence, competence and resources. Grandma Ida had named her, rather than her mother or Uncle Jay or any of the cousins, the president of Bloom’s because Grandma Ida trusted her and had faith in her. Having Grandma Ida’s trust and faith had done wonders for Julia’s self-confidence.

  Even so, what she was about to ask wasn’t simple, nor was Grandma Ida’s reaction predictable. “Here’s what I was thinking,” she said. “I want my wedding catered by Bloom’s. I want it to have a homey feel to it, a Bloom’s feel. And I’m having a hell of a time finding a venue that will let me bring in my own caterer. I guess they all make their biggest profits on the catering.”

  “What’s a venue?” Grandma Ida asked. “I don’t know that word, a venue.”

  “A location,” Julia defined the term. “A place to have something.”

  “It sounds like a street. Park a-Venue. Fifth a-Venue.”

  “Well.” Julia paused, then launched back into her pitch. “I kept thinking, if only I had a home big enough, I’d host the wedding there. I don’t, though.”

  “That apartment you have, it’s the size of a toilet,” Grandma Ida remarked.

  “It is not! It’s much bigger than a toilet,” Julia protested.

  “It’s a little place. You put two people in it, one has to breathe out while the other one’s breathing in or you’ll run out of air.”

  If Grandma Ida thought Julia’s apartment was small, she ought to have a look at the dive Susie was sharing with two other women. Cousin Rick’s apartment was even tinier. But Grandma Ida never visited their places. Anything south of Thirty-fourth Street didn’t exist for her. “On Thirty-fourth Street you’ve got Macy’s and Penn Station,” Grandma Ida pointed out on occasion. “What’s south of there? Wall Street? Feh. City Hall? Who needs it? Greenwich Village? Beatniks. Feh.”

  But in her contempt for Julia’s apartment, Grandma Ida was providing ammunition for Julia’s argument. “You’ve got a big enough apartment, Grandma,” she said, trying not to sound too eager. “We could fit eighty people in here.”

  “Eighty people? In my apartment? Oy!”

  “We could do it, Grandma. Or maybe we could cut the guest list down to seventy-five. We could have a buffet of Bloom’s food in the dining room, set up some tables in the living room, cocktails in the library and musicians in the foyer. We could do it.”

  “Where would people dance?”

  Julia stifled a laugh. That her eighty-nine-year-old grandmother cared about dancing amused her. Of course, Grandma Ida herself wouldn’t dance. She’d just sit—in the very chair she was sitting in now, no doubt—and make snide comments about the guests who did want to dance.

  “In the living room,” Julia answered. “The tables we’d set up would be little end tables, places for people to put down their plates. We could roll up the rug, or lay a temporary parquet over it.”

  “What are you talking, a temporary floor?”

  “Just a smooth surface over the rug to make dancing easier. I could work with a rental company on that. We’d rent dishes, silverware, stemware—everything. No one would touch your plates.”

  “And you want Lyndon to do all that work?”

  “Of course not. I’ll hire servers. They’ll do all the setup and cleanup. Lyndon will be a guest at the wedding.”

  “He’ll want to bring that friend of his, Howard,” Grandma Ida warned in a whisper. “They’re faygelas, the two of them.”

  “They’re a lovely couple,” Julia said.

  “Howard, at least he’s Jewish. A Jew and a black man, I don’t know…”

  “Don’t worry about Lyndon,” Julia said, guiding her grandmother back to the subject at hand. “What do you think about having the wedding here? We’d have professional cleaners come in before and after. They’d do all the work. The day after the wedding, you’d never know it had been here.”

  “I wouldn’t know? You think I’d forget my first grandchild’s wedding?”

  “What I mean is, everything would be left the way it is right now. All the furniture would be in place, the kitchen scrubbed down, everything back to normal.”

  “It’s a farkakte idea,” Grandma Ida declared. “It’s meshugge.”

  Grandma Ida’s words stung, bringing fresh tears to Julia’s eyes. She’d always associated Yiddish words with warmth and affection and family ties—but they could also be weapons. She’d thought her grandmother might object to turning over her residence to such a big party, having strangers taking over her kitchen and arranging guest towels in her bathrooms. She might have complained about the inconvenience, the risk to her furniture, the noise. But farkakte? Meshugge? Those words weren’t aimed at the idea. They were aimed at Julia.

  “I think it’s a good idea,” she argued, struggling to keep her tears out of her voice. “Where did you get married? In your parents’ home?”

  “In the shul, of course. The rabbi was there, we stood under a chupah, Isaac, may he rest, smashed a glass and we broke bread and drank wine. And the next day we were back at the pushcart, selling knishes. No honeymoon. No caterer. None of that stuff.”

  “Well, Ron and I are going to have a honeymoon. And a caterer.”

  “So have your wedding in your mother’s apartment. It’s as big as mine.”

  “She would never let me,” Julia explained. “She wants to have the wedding at the Plaza Hotel because her brother’s son had his bar mitzvah there.”

  Grandma Ida clicked her tongue and shook her head. “Your mother,” she muttered. “And Martha is an idiot, so you can’t have your wedding at her apartment. Uncle Jay’s apartment—”

  “Isn’t as big as yours,” Julia completed the sentence. “The Plaza won’t let me use Bloom’s to cater. Central Park won’t let me serve liquor.”

  “What? No wine at a wedding?”

  “Obviously Central Park is out.” Julia sighed. “There are venues—places,” she corrected herself, “that rent out for weddings, but they aren’t necessarily bigger than your apartment.”

  “And, what, you want to set up a chupah here? A canopy big enough to get married under?”

  “We can have the actual ceremony in a synagogue. This would just be for the reception.”

  “What synagogue? You belong to a synagogue?”

  “There are eleven synagogues within ten blocks of here,” Julia assured her. A person couldn’t walk more than a few steps on Manhattan’s Upper West Side without stumbling upon a synagogue. Ron had promised he’d call the neighborhood temples and find out what they’d require of him and Julia in order to hold their wedding there. If they had to join a congregation, they would. But that was his headache. They’d divvied up the headaches: he’d won the service and she’d won the reception.

  “So, the synagogue doesn’t have a basement room?”

  “I don’t want to have my reception in a basement room,” Julia protested. “Basement rooms have no windows.”

  “And I’ve got windows, so you want to have the reception here.”

  “I want to have it here because you’re my grandmother.” Julia hated her plaintive undertone, but she couldn’t swallow it down. Her wistfulness was unjustified; she couldn’t have hoped for Grandma Ida to magically turn into one of those plump, doting grandmothers eager to spoil her grandchildren with home-baked cookies and lavish indulgences. Grandma Ida had never once opened her arms to Julia and said, Bubbela, whatever you want. She’d never said, You are gorgeous, or a genius, or perfect, the way grandmothers were supposed to gush over their grandchildren, the way Grandma Ethel, on Julia’s mother’s side, did. Grandma Ethel would have been the exemplar of grandmotherliness—plump and overflowing with indiscriminate compliments—except that she’d moved down to Boca Raton three years ago and now spent more of her time playing golf and bleaching her hair an ever lighter blond than spoiling her grandchildren. But when she’d lived in Riverdale, she’d always lavished unwarranted praise on Susie, Adam and Julia, as well as Travis and his sister, Corinne.

  The greatest praise Grandma Ida had ever given Julia was when she’d said, “You remind me of me.” Which could have been as easily interpreted as an insult.

  So Julia shouldn’t have expected her to say, Of course you can have your reception in my apartment! I would consider it an honor!

  “All right, never mind,” Julia said briskly, refusing to let that whimpery undertone filter into her voice again. “I’ve got to get back downstairs. I have to iron out a problem with one of our yogurt suppliers.”

  “Gonefs, all of them,” Grandma Ida grunted. “So I’ll think about this idea of yours. It’s tsadreit, but I’ll think about it.”

  Should Julia be grateful? Was Grandma Ida really going to think about the idea, or was she simply stringing Julia along, coming as close as she’d ever come to Bubbela, whatever you want? It almost didn’t matter. Julia felt drained and glum, as if Aunt Martha had left her cloud behind when she’d departed and it had settled just inches above Julia’s head, poised to spit rain on her.

  Suppressing a sigh, she stood and bent over to kiss her grandmother’s cheek. “Don’t let those yogurt people steal you blind,” Grandma Ida warned, as if Julia needed such counsel. She was tempted to retort, in a sweet voice, that she hoped Grandma Ida would enjoy the book about broads versus God. But she held her sarcasm and faked yet another smile. Grandma Ida did say she’d consider Julia’s farkakte plan, after all.

  Lyndon had disappeared somewhere in the nether reaches of the apartment, so Julia let herself out without saying goodbye to him. She was so edgy she actually contemplated climbing down the twenty-two flights of stairs to her office rather than taking the elevator, but she was wearing shoes with clunky heels, and if she took the stairs she’d be farschvitzed by the time she got downstairs.

  Twenty minutes in Grandma Ida’s company and she was thinking in Yiddish.

  She pressed the elevator button and commanded her brain to clarify itself. No matter that Grandma Ida had tossed her a scrap and said she’d think about it—Julia couldn’t count on having her wedding on the twenty-fifth floor of the Bloom Building. She had to find another location.

  She’d telephoned a couple of boating outfits. A wedding party on the Hudson River would be delightful, assuming none of the guests suffered from seasickness, but the companies had all insisted on supplying their own caterers. Maybe her cousin Neil could find her a more open-minded yacht-rental service. He ran a sailing charter business in southern Florida, but half of southern Florida was transplanted New Yorkers like Grandma Ethel, so she shouldn’t discount the possibility that he knew some boating firms in the city.

  She’d check with the Cloisters again, too. So what if the place was full of medieval Christian art? At least it was beautiful medieval Christian art. The last time she’d spoken to a representative there, he’d informed her of the museum’s formidable deposit—“in case an irreplaceable artifact gets damaged,” he’d explained, and she’d flashed on a vision of Adam gesticulating too broadly and smashing his hand through a priceless stained-glass window—and the museum also banned alcoholic beverages.

  Which meant she was back to the loft and townhouse venues, all of them exorbitantly priced and prepared to fight to the death over who would do the catering.

  If she’d realized planning a wedding would be so complicated, she would have purchased two tickets to Las Vegas and had an Elvis impersonator marry her and Ron in a ticky-tack chapel on the Strip.

  She emerged from the elevator on the third floor and strolled through the broad hallway, past the open doors to her office. “Julia,” Dierdre Morrissey shouted through her door, “Melvin Slatnik from Galicia Cured Meats called to discuss our pastrami order. He wants you to call him back immediately.”

  Julia rolled her eyes. Everything with Slatnik was always an emergency.

  “Also, one of the cash registers is down. I phoned the service company. Also, our bel paese delivery is going to be delayed a day. Don’t ask me why. The guy on the phone didn’t speak English. Also, Morty Sugarman from the bagel department wants a minute with you sometime before the end of the week.”

  So many crises, so little time. “Thanks,” Julia shouted through Dierdre’s open door. Through her mother’s open door, adjacent to Dierdre’s, Julia heard the phone ring. She prayed that whoever was on the other end of the line had a crisis her mother could handle without her help.