The eggplant man—thin, bearded, earringed, probably a vegetarian—handed her his credit card and she ran it through the machine. No tip for a take-out order, of course. Yet she believed she deserved some sort of bonus for creating such a neatly wrapped hero out of such disgusting ingredients. The vegetarian signed the charge slip, handed it to her and carried his take-out bag to the door. Once he was gone, she turned to discover Anna and Rick staring at her. Anna waved at her to join them.

  No other customers occupied tables. Nico was in the kitchen, using the lull between the lunch and dinner surges to prepare fresh pots of sauce and fresh mounds of dough. Susie couldn’t count on him to call her into the kitchen. She was stuck.

  Sighing, she filled a glass of water for herself, wiped her hands on her apron and trudged across the scuffed checkerboard-tile floor to their table. She could have heated a leftover slice of pizza for herself, but what little appetite she had evaporated as she settled into a chair facing these two people who supposedly adored her and who, she knew, were about to give her a very hard time.

  “You have to go to a poetry slam,” Anna announced. “Rick and I decided.” She tossed back her long, black hair, revealing the row of earrings that trimmed her lobe.

  Susie had trouble getting around the idea of Anna and Rick collaborating on a plan for her. “You decided,” she muttered.

  “The only poetry you’re writing these days is that crap for the Bloom’s Bulletin,” Rick said.

  Self-righteous anger flared within Susie. “Those poems aren’t crap. They’re carefully wrought limericks. Do you have any idea how hard it is to come up with a rhyme for stroganoff?” It had been so hard she’d telephoned Casey for help, so hard she’d been forced to admit she was in love with him when he’d provided her with the rhyme. Limericks had proven to be an emotional minefield for her.

  “There’s a poetry slam at that scuzzy coffeehouse around the corner from my apartment this weekend,” Rick told her. “You should write something for it. Anna’ll be there.”

  Susie gazed at Anna in surprise. Anna shrugged sheepishly. “For once in his life, Rick is paying for our food,” she said, gesturing at the discarded pizza crusts resting on their plates. “How can I say no?”

  “She’s got a price, just like all of us,” Rick said with a grin.

  Susie was discouraged to think Anna’s price was a whopping five dollars plus tax. She wondered where Rick had gotten the money to splurge on this midafternoon snack. For him, even five bucks was a lot. “Are you paying for this out of the film budget?” she asked, disapproval coloring her tone.

  “Stop spying for your sister,” Rick retorted. “She’s the one who’s got you writing those dumb-ass limericks. She’s no friend of yours.”

  “The limericks were my idea,” Susie said. “And besides, Julia pays me for those limericks. She pays me to write the damn bulletin.”

  “So? Writing a poem for the slam would pay you emotionally.”

  Great. Just what Susie needed: emotional compensation.

  “Let it all out, Suze, that’s all I’m saying.” Rick patted her on the shoulder, then drained his glass, his straw making obscene slurping noises as he sucked the dregs of root beer and crushed ice from the bottom of his glass. “Look at you. Your life stinks.”

  “Thanks,” she snapped.

  “He’s right,” Anna chimed in. “You need to get past this.”

  Get past what? Blowing off Casey and then seeing the error of her ways in time to get blown off by him? Giving her love to him when he no longer wanted it? Chasing the train down the tracks with her heart in her hands and no sign of him even waving from the window, because he was off having a drink in the club car with Halle Berry?

  “Poetry would be good therapy,” Anna said. “It’ll get you out of the pits.”

  “Or at least keep you company while you’re in the pits,” Rick added. “I’ll be scheduling you to do some voice-over stuff for the movie. But we can talk about that another time. You’re working now.”

  Yeah, she was—for real money, not the emotional kind. She took the ten-dollar bill Rick extended to her and carried it to the counter. “Keep the change,” he said as he and Anna rose from the table.

  Big tipper, Susie thought, unable to shake her suspicion that he was tipping her with money from the film budget.

  As if his generous tip would make or break anything—including her. She pocketed the change and waved limply as Anna and Rick waltzed out of the pizzeria. Given the lack of patrons filling the place, now would be a good time to sweep the floors and tidy up a bit.

  Instead, she grabbed her order pad and pen and wrote, Losing Linus.

  She stared at the title for a moment, clicking the pen open and shut a few times on her chin, then continued:

  Lobsters turn red when boiled.

  Hearts turn hard when burned.

  Bread blackens in the fire.

  Chocolate melts, messy.

  Love flames out or freezes, either way

  It is gone.

  Nothing to eat, and I’m hollow, ravenous, needy.

  Maybe she wasn’t hollow, ravenous and needy, but she was hungry. She tore off the top sheet of her pad and tucked it into the hip pocket of her black jeans, then cleared off and wiped down the table where Anna and Rick had been sitting. Once it was spotless, she sauntered into the kitchen. Pots simmered on the stove, filling the room with the blended fragrance of Romano tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and basil. Susie liked to imagine that Italy smelled exactly like Nico’s kitchen.

  She spotted Nico hovering just outside the back door, enjoying a cigarette with Orlando, a Puerto Rican kid fresh out of high school whom Nico was trying to turn Italian by revealing for him the mysteries of pizza and pasta preparation. They smiled and nodded at Susie, who returned the greeting before yanking open the heavy aluminum door of one of the industrial refrigerators. She grabbed a handful of pitted black olives from a tub, tossed them all into her mouth and chomped down on their flimsy flesh, letting the salty juice bathe her tongue. While she was still chewing, she tore a chunk from a large, knotted wad of mozzarella. Chocolate would have satisfied her more than cheese and olives, but Nico didn’t keep desserts in that refrigerator, and she wanted to stuff her face quickly and get back to the front room.

  Detouring to the sink, she wedged the cheese between her jaws, freeing her hands so she could rinse the olive juice from her palms. Once she’d dried them, she carried the cheese back to her post behind the counter in the front room. No one had come in, so she picked up her pen, grabbed a to-go paper plate and scribbled:

  Now the lobster is gone.

  Red, ugly, chipped, hard shell, cheap plastic.

  In the end, the lobster is gone.

  In the end, the end of love.

  Two tottering old men with matching duck-head canes entered the restaurant. She hid the plate on a shelf below the counter and shaped a welcoming smile for them. The men were adorable, one a few inches taller than the other, one sporting a faded Yankees cap and the other hatless, his fuzzy gray hair circling his freckled scalp like a laurel wreath. Both had age spots on their hands and wore cardigans, even though the afternoon air had reached the midseventies. The men bickered for a few minutes about meatballs versus sausage. “We buy only one hero and split it,” the taller one explained.

  “It’s too much, one of those sandwiches,” the shorter one said. “I can’t finish it myself.”

  “My grandson could finish it,” the taller one noted. “My Danny, he can eat everything. And does.”

  “He’s the monster that ate Pittsburgh, your Danny.”

  “Oy. Fifteen years old and almost six feet tall, and he eats all the time.”

  “So we’ll get the sausage?” the shorter one said.

  “I hate the sausage. It makes me fortz.”

  “Everything makes you fortz,” the shorter one complained. “You’re an alter fortzer.”

  “If you’d like,” Susie offered, just because these men amused her and she didn’t want to give the taller one gas, “I could make two half sandwiches, one with meatballs and one with sausage. How would that be?”

  The men looked stunned, then ecstatic. “You would do that for us?” the shorter one asked.

  “It’s not a problem.”

  Their expressions changed from ecstatic to transported. Smitten. They were in love with her because she could make two half sandwiches with different fillings. And neither of them appeared like the sort who would force her to change her life for him, to move in and settle down and marry him.

  She went into the kitchen to assemble their two-part sandwich. Slicing the roll was therapeutic; she pretended the hard crust was Casey’s thick skull as she sawed the knife blade through it. She filled each half with the requested filling, slid the sandwich into the pizza oven for a minute to warm it up, then wrapped each half separately, glancing behind her to make sure Nico wasn’t watching. He’d probably have a fit if he knew she was going to so much effort for a couple of geezers.

  They tipped her generously, even though they’d ordered the sandwich to go. Once they’d shuffled out of the restaurant, she grabbed her pen and a napkin and continued her poem.

  It felt good to write, she realized. Rick and Anna had spoken the truth. Whether or not Susie went to the slam, she needed to write something real, something deep, something that exorcised her pain. Something that didn’t entail finding a rhyme for stroganoff.

  The lobster, she wrote, is all. The lobster is gone. The lobster is red and chipped and hiding within its shell, like my heart.

  Her cell phone started ringing as she climbed the stairs to her apartment, but she couldn’t answer it because her hands were full. She carried a large pizza box filled with paper plates, napkins, order slips and a straw wrapper, all with bits and pieces of her poem scribbled onto them. This was a huge poem, an epic, one that required assembly. Once she got upstairs and emptied and unfolded the box—which had several fervent stanzas written inside the lid—she could put it all together and figure out if she’d created a masterpiece or dreck. She was a little worried about whether she’d be able to read her handwriting on the straw wrapper, but despite that concern, she was pretty sure what she’d created was magnificent.

  She’d left Nico’s early tonight—ten-thirty—because she’d worked the lunch shift. Even lugging her poem-in-a-pizza-box, she’d arrived at her building only ten minutes later, so the chirping of the phone in her purse at this hour didn’t alarm her. She wasn’t going to stop halfway up the stairs to her apartment to put down her box and answer it, though. Whoever was calling her would have to wait until she got inside.

  Balancing the box while she unlocked the three bolts on her door was tricky enough without the damn phone nagging at her to hurry. She shoved the door open with her hip, nodded toward Caitlin and Anna, who were both seated on the sofa simultaneously polishing their nails and watching a VH1 rerun about the Milli Vanilli scandal, and set her box down on the dining table near the window. The kitchen was too small to contain a table. It was practically too small to contain a refrigerator, which was one reason they had such an undersized refrigerator, the other reason being that their landlord was a cheap bastard.

  “Did you bring us leftovers?” Caitlin asked, motioning toward the box with her nail-polish brush.

  “No,” Susie said, tugging at her purse’s drawstring to get to her phone. “It’s a poem.” She found the noisy little gadget and pressed the Connect button. “Hello?”

  “Susie, it’s me,” Julia’s voice came through the phone. “I’m sorry I’m calling so late. Are you at work?”

  “It’s not that late and I’m not at work. What’s up?” Something was, if Julia’s tense voice was anything to judge by. Susie stepped inside the cramped kitchen and opened the fridge, hoping to find an open bottle of wine in it. Life was sweet; a screw-top bottle half full of Chablis stood on the top shelf. Caitlin’s, probably; her palate was about as discriminating as that of the guy Susie often found sleeping it off in the alley behind Nico’s. Screw-top Chablis was probably Susie’s least favorite wine in the world—it tasted like water with a few mild pollutants mixed in—but wine was wine.

  Tucking the phone between her ear and her shoulder, she poured some wine into a tumbler and returned to the table. “I need to kill Mom,” Julia said. “Will you help?”

  “Sure.” What were sisters for? Susie sat on one of the chairs and kicked her tired feet up on another. She used her toes to pry off her sandals, leaned her shoulders back and decided that the dining set she and her roommates had bought for fifty bucks from their upstairs neighbor three years ago, when he’d decided on a whim to quit his job as an auditor for the Transit Authority to work on a salmon boat in Alaska, was just barely worth what they’d paid for it. The back of the chair didn’t conform to her back at all, and the seat was hard and unmolded, making her uncomfortably aware of her hipbones. “Why are we killing her?” she asked before sipping from her glass.

  “I told her Ron and I were going to have our wedding reception in Grandma Ida’s apartment.”

  “You are?” Susie nearly choked on her wine. She nudged the pizza box to one side of the table and put down her glass, then swung her legs around to a different chair so she would have her back to Caitlin and Anna. She didn’t care if they overheard the conversation, but seeing them hunched over their feet, with wads of cotton protruding from between their toes, was too distracting. Susie couldn’t afford to be distracted when her sister was telling her something so bizarre. “Why?”

  “We weren’t planning on a big reception with a huge invitation list,” Julia explained. “And Grandma Ida’s apartment is spacious. We can fit everyone in. We figured the musicians could set up in the foyer, and we could do a buffet in the dining room, and everyone could mill around.”

  “What did Grandma Ida say about this?”

  “She said yes. So we decided to go for it. I want my wedding catered by Bloom’s, and we were really struggling to find a place where we could bring our own caterer in. Of course, Grandma Ida has no objection to letting Bloom’s cater the wedding.”

  “Great.” Grandma Ida’s apartment gave Susie the creeps, but that was mostly because it was filled with so many memories of Grandma Ida criticizing her, Grandma Ida telling her to calm down, Grandma Ida complaining that she shouldn’t jiggle her legs so much while she was eating because all that jiggling made her drop crumbs on the floor. She probably wouldn’t be able to jiggle much in a bridesmaid’s dress—God only knew what Julia had in mind for her to wear—and she’d hardly be the only guest to drop crumbs on the floor. If Grandma Ida was okay with it, Susie had no objections. “So why are we killing Mom?”

  “She went ballistic when she heard the plan. She wants me to have the wedding at the Plaza.”

  “Big deal. It’s not her wedding.”

  “It’s her daughter’s wedding, which she thinks is the same thing.” Julia sighed. “I told her the wedding was going to be at Grandma Ida’s, and she went whining to Norman.”

  “Norman?”

  “Ron’s father. Her boyfriend. Only, he’s not her boyfriend anymore, because he told her it was up to Ron and me where to have the wedding, and she should stay out of it. At which point, I gather she blew up at him, and now they haven’t talked to each other for days and she claims it’s all my fault.”

  Their mother had a boyfriend? Where had Susie been?

  Up in Maine, communing with Linus and the potatoes. In Boston, standing ankle deep in decaying lettuce leaves at Haymarket Square. At Pine Haven, sitting on a rickety cabin porch and staring at the muddy water of Pine Haven Lake and convincing herself that home and family were wonderful, and perhaps marriage wasn’t the absolute worst thing in the world.

  And all that time, while she was starring in Rick’s movie and rethinking her life, her mother was dating Ron’s father?

  Apparently, her mother wasn’t dating him now, because he refused to meddle in Julia’s wedding plans. He sounded like a nice guy. “Look, Julia. It’s your wedding. If I’ve got to wear a gown, Mom can survive a party in Grandma Ida’s apartment. After a few drinks, she might not even know where she is.”

  “I can only hope,” Julia muttered. “Meanwhile, she’s making me crazy. She was so happy with Norman, he was so intelligent, he was such a gentleman—by which I think she meant they weren’t sleeping together, thank God—and now they’re not talking because he refuses to support her in her mishegas.”

  “So they’re not talking,” Susie said, then took a sip of the wine and tried not to cringe. It tasted like piss water with a finish of tin. “It’s her mishegas, not yours.”

  “Right. I’m going to have a wedding where the mother of the bride isn’t talking to the father of the groom.”

  “Well, the mother of the groom isn’t talking to the father of the groom, either, is she?” As Susie recalled, Joffe’s parents were still fuming over their divorce, which had occurred twenty-something years ago. “It’s your wedding, Julia. Have it wherever you want, and serve whatever food you want. If Mom doesn’t like it, tough shit.”

  “You don’t work two doors away from her office,” Julia pointed out. “She spent most of today giving me grief. Even Uncle Jay intervened. He told her to leave me alone. Who would have guessed that Uncle Jay, of all people, would come to my aid over something like this?”

  “Uncle Jay loves you.” More than that, Susie thought, Uncle Jay hated their mother. However the family dynamics shook out, Julia should grab whatever allies she could find and hang on to them.

  “Listen—could you come up to the store tomorrow? I know it’s not your usual day to be here, but I was hoping maybe you could talk to Mom.”