Chapter Twenty-Two

Susie arrived at her old apartment carrying her sack-sized purse, a duffel bag filled with spare clothes, and a box of Casey’s assorted muffins which hadn’t sold and were otherwise destined, along with that day’s other unsold but edible merchandise, for a soup kitchen near the Manhattan Bridge. She might be leaving him, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t help herself to some goodies on her way out the door.

The apartment she’d shared with Anna and Caitlin had only one bedroom which could fit—barely—two narrow beds. When all three women had lived there, they used to rotate among the beds and the couch in the main room, although Caitlin tended to spend enough of her nights with other people—friends, lovers, hook-ups—that Anna and Susie had both gotten to use the beds most of the time.

Susie would be sleeping on the couch tonight. It wasn’t particularly comfortable, but she planned to stay up late enough that when she finally stretched out on the lumpy upholstery, she’d be too tired to care.

“Did you bring us doughnuts?” Caitlin asked eagerly. She was wearing lounge pants with little polar bears patterned on them, a baggy Henley shirt, and strips of paper towel woven between her bare toes in preparation for a pedicure. As she shook a bottle of scarlet nail polish, she eyed the box hungrily.

Susie set it on the tiny table next to the kitchen alcove and dropped onto one of the chairs. “Muffins,” she said. “Casey doesn’t make doughnuts. But the muffins are really good.”

Anna was barefoot, too. Susie wondered whether they were doing a better job of keeping the floor vacuumed than they had when she’d lived there. Then she noticed Anna’s yoga mat rolled up and leaning against a wall, and realized Anna must have just finished her yoga. Which could explain why she was wearing yoga pants.

Anna pried open the box’s lid, peered inside, and smiled. “You want something to drink,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“What do you have?”

“Wine,” Anna said.

“And tequila,” Caitlin added, settling onto another chair and propping her feet on the edge of the seat so she could rest her chin on her knees. She peered into the box, nodded her approval, and then proceeded to polish her toenails.

“Tequila. Sounds good,” Susie said.

Anna pulled three glasses from the cabinet above the sink. Susie recognized them; she’d bought them at a job-lot schlock house in the neighborhood for fifty cents a glass. They were ugly, with narrow ridges etched into them that reminded Susie of corduroy, and she’d had no qualms about leaving them behind when she and Casey had moved in together. But she was here now, not with him, and it seemed right that she should be drinking tequila from an ugly glass.

Anna poured an inch into each glass, then sat across from Susie and tossed back her long, straight hair. Rick was obsessed with Anna’s hair. He always raved about how it was so black it looked blue, and confessed that he dreamed of raveling his fingers through it and discovering that it felt as soft as it looked. In all honesty, Susie thought Anna would look a lot cooler if she chopped it off. At least six inches shorter, maybe eight. And added bangs.

But Anna’s hair didn’t matter. She was a true friend, and so was Caitlin. Without a moment’s hesitation, they’d urged Susie to come and stay with them when she’d sent them the cryptic text: Casey trouble. They understood what that meant. It meant she needed friends and a place to stay. And tequila.

She took a sip of the liquor and felt it burn past her throat, down her esophagus, into her stomach. God, that stuff tasted awful. She took another sip.

Lowering her glass, she saw Anna gazing expectantly at her. Caitlin was dabbing polish on her final nail, and then she screwed the cap back onto the bottle of polish, set it on the table, and lifted her gaze to Susie, too.

“Well?” Anna prompted her.

“We had a fight,” Susie said. As fights went, it hadn’t been much—but in her mind and her heart, it had been huge, partly because she and Casey fought so rarely. They disagreed, and they discussed things, and they occasionally sulked. But this time, this fight…it hadn’t just been a disagreement or a discussion.

“The window of his store is boring,” she told Caitlin and Anna. “I came up with a much better design. It’s not like I don’t know what I’m doing. I design the Bloom’s windows, right? I used to design the window at Nico’s. So I came up with this fabulous design for Casey’s bakery window. It had a big crescent moon, and lots of stars, and then some loaves displayed below, and a few loaves sort of floating in the air among the stars. Because bread is magic.”

“Okay,” Anna said carefully.

Caitlin’s eyes widened. “Wow. He didn’t like that?”

“I don’t even know if he liked it or not. He said he had to check with his best friend, Mose, and Mose didn’t like it.”

“His best friend?” Anna sounded indignant. “Aren’t you his best friend?”

“That’s exactly it. I’m supposed to be his best friend. I’m his woman. His lover. I live with him. Lived,” she added, although using the past tense sounded so sad. What if they never made up? What if this disagreement was the one that destroyed their relationship forever?

It wasn’t about the window, really. It was about trust, and best-friendship, and whom Casey chose to listen to in his life. “He’s known Mose a lot longer than he’s known me,” she said, wondering why she was rationalizing Casey’s rejection of her ideas. “They met when they were told they weren’t good enough to join the St. John’s basketball team as walk-ons their freshman year.”

“St. John’s?” Caitlin had a way of latching onto the unimportant details. “I thought Casey went to the Culinary Institute of America.”

“He went to St. John’s, and then to the C.I.A.” Calling the culinary school the C.I.A. that was one of Casey and Susie’s jokes. He was the antithesis of a spy, after all—so absurdly straightforward he drove her crazy sometimes. “Mose has an MBA, so Casey acts as if Mose is the world’s expert in everything. And Mose said having stars and moons and bread floating through the sky like UFOs made no sense.”

“It doesn’t have to make sense,” Anna said.

“That’s why I love you,” Susie said. “A window doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to grab the attention of passers-by. It has to captivate them and then lure them inside. You understand that.” She raised her glass in a toast to Anna and took a drink. With each sip, it tasted a little less vile. It was probably anesthetizing her taste buds. “The moon holds everything together. The stars represent magic, but the moon represents solidity. Security. Beauty and illumination.”

“What does the floating bread represent?” Caitlin asked.

“It represents bread,” Susie said. “It tells the world, ‘This is what we’re selling.’ I tried to explain this to Casey, but he said Mose knows about store windows because of his frickin’ MBA. Casey took Mose’s side over mine. And that hurts.” A sob bubbled up at the back of her mouth, but she swallowed it back down.

“Maybe it’s just a guy thing,” Caitlin said as she reached for a muffin. “Bros stick together. No girls allowed in the clubhouse, and all that bullshit. Or maybe Casey thinks you’re a poet and he wants a hard-headed business person figuring out his window. What is this, anyway? Does it have raisins in it?”

Susie leaned across the table and squinted at the muffin, hoping to identify it by its appearance. “Walnuts,” she said. “That’s an oat bran muffin. So healthy, it’ll add ten years to your life.”

“Yeah, right.” Caitlin took a bite and swallowed. “A little stale, but delicious.”

“These were the unsold ones. If they don’t sell within two days of being baked, they get discounted. If they don’t sell at the discounted price, Casey donates them to a soup kitchen—or the staff can take them.”

“I remember when you said Casey was Godiva dark chocolate,” Anna remarked.

Susie nodded. She remembered, too. Back in her single days, she and Anna and Caitlin used to compare the men in their lives to chocolate. The guy she’d been dating before she met Casey was a Snickers. Caitlin had told Susie her most recent boyfriend was a Twix, neither here nor there. The second violinist Anna had been seeing lately was, according to her, a Hershey’s bar—solid, reliable, but not terribly interesting. She also said she thought Rick was licorice, which wasn’t chocolate but seemed about right.

When Susie had first met Casey, he’d definitely been Godiva dark chocolate, gourmet-rich, a complex of sweet and bitter and mysterious. She’d been as infatuated with him as she was with that imported Belgian confection. He’d seemed so unusual. Exotic, almost—tall and blond and eerily placid, from the distant land of Queens, New York. He’d been working with Morty Sugarman, baking and selling bagels at Bloom’s, and his bagels, then as now, were the best bagels she had ever tasted. She’d all but thrown herself at him, and he’d insisted that he wouldn’t sleep with her until he got to know her better, which was something no man had ever done with her before. For a while, she’d thought he might be a virgin, or possibly gay.

He most definitely wasn’t either of those things. He was phenomenal in bed—or he had been, before he’d started falling asleep at nine p.m.

“He’s turned into M&M’s,” she told her friends. “Sweet, but with a hard shell that won’t melt.”

“I love M&M’s,” Anna said. “M&M peanuts, though. Not the plain chocolate ones.”

“He could be one of those new M&M flavors,” Caitlin said. “Mint, or peanut butter, or pretzel.”

“There’s an M&M pretzel flavor?” Anna looked stunned.

The discussion was veering off course. Susie steered it back. “He should respect me as much as he respects Mose, right? Like you said, I should be his best friend. He should trust me. I’m not an idiot.”

“Of course you’re not,” Anna said.

“You’re a genius,” Caitlin added, which seemed a bit over the top, but Susie appreciated the compliment.

“Here we are, living together,” Susie continued. “He’s asked me to marry him a bunch of times. But I can’t confide in him, because he’s too busy confiding in Mose.”

“You can confide in us,” Anna said, patting her hand in reassurance before lifting her glass to drink.

Susie drank, too. So did Caitlin. She loved these friends, maybe even loved them more than she loved Casey at the moment. Maybe loved them more than he loved Mose.

But he was only the biggest of her long list of problems. “I can’t even talk to him about all the other stuff going on in my life,” she said, hearing a wobble in her voice as the incipient sob threatened to break free once more. “Half the time he’s home, he’s sleeping. When he’s awake, he’s worrying about the store.”

“Well, it’s still kind of new,” Caitlin said reasonably. “He wants it to succeed.”

“It’s doing fine,” Susie said. “He earns a small fortune just from his bagel account with Bloom’s.” Saying Bloom’s fueled the sob, making it swell until she was afraid she’d choke on it. It was so weird, this urge to cry. She wasn’t used to it. She took a swig of tequila and felt the incipient sob slide back down her throat. “Everything at Bloom’s is a mess,” she reported. “My sister is freaking out because my uncle is trying to compete with her by opening a deli of his own. I haven’t talked to my mother in days—which maybe isn’t such a terrible thing. My brother has gone to the dark side with my uncle. My grandmother cried in front of me. I didn’t know she could cry, but I definitely saw tears run down her cheeks. I’ve known her my entire life, and I never saw her cry until Julia threatened to sue Uncle Jay.”

“Ooh.” Caitlin wrinkled her freckled nose. “That’s always a bad thing, when family members sue each other.”

Anna agreed with a nod.

“And I can’t even talk to Casey about any of this. He’s so preoccupied with his store, and payroll, and health inspections, and blah-blah-blah. And whatever Mose tells him.”

“Casey doesn’t know any of this is going on?”

“He knows,” Susie conceded. “But he just tells me everything will be okay, and I’m the strongest Bloom in the family, and I should just ride out the storm. It’s, I don’t know. Patronizing.”

“He’s right,” Anna said. “You are the strongest Bloom.” Not that she was an expert on Susie’s family.

“I don’t feel strong.”

Caitlin broke off a chunk of her muffin and handed it to Susie. “Eat this. It’ll make you strong.”

“It’ll put hair on your chest,” Anna chimed in, helping herself to a date-bran muffin.

Susie laughed. One thing she didn’t want was a hairy chest.

“Everything will work out however it’s supposed to work out,” Caitlin said. That was the extent of her philosophy of life, but it kept her going. Nothing ever flattened her. She’d get knocked down, she’d weep buckets or rage like a tornado, and then she’d shrug and say, “Well, I guess that was the way it was supposed to work out,” and she’d move on. Anna did yoga, but Caitlin was, in her own loud way, the most Zen of the three of them.

Susie didn’t do yoga. Holding poses, taking slow breaths… She lacked the patience for all that. Her philosophy of life was basically: when things are good, enjoy them for all they’re worth. When things are bad, write a poem about them. Also—with a nod to Shakespeare—to your own self be true.

Her truth right now was that she had lost her anchors. Her main anchor, Casey, valued his friend Mose more than he valued her. Her other anchor, her family, was corroded and crumbling, as if it had spent too much time submerged in a salty, polluted sea.

But she had Anna and Caitlin, and the living room couch, and tequila. And stale muffins.

She might not be the strongest Bloom, but she’d survive.

She reached into the box and pulled out a pumpkin-pecan muffin. For strength, she told herself. For strength, and to soak up the tequila.