Love in Bloom's

by Judith Arnold

  Susie hated to agree with her mother about anything, but the temptation was strong. Julia had been stressed out, grouchy, upset. Sondra probably didn’t know that the main source of her stress was her lover’s collusion with Grandma Ida. But it was not beyond reason to fear she was ready to snap.

  And if she snapped, Susie definitely ought to be there to gather up the pieces and glue them back together. No one else loved Julia the way Susie did.

  Her gaze returned to Casey, still seated across the small room. He watched her, obviously aware that the call wasn’t good news. But he didn’t crowd her, didn’t rush to her side and take over. He just watched, his expression concerned but trusting.

  She would much rather spend the rest of the morning making love with him, over and over and over. Twenty hours of foreplay had left her so primed that merely looking at him caused her womb to tighten and her thighs to clench. But her sister needed her.

  And Casey wasn’t going to disappear. She knew that in her soul. It was all part of that connection between them.

  She turned back to the phone. “All right,” she promised. “I’ll be there.”

  21

  The intercom buzzer sounded like a bumblebee on steroids.

  Julia glared at the clock built into her oven. Nine on a Sunday morning was too early for someone to be visiting. But the buzzer kept sounding. Whoever was downstairs in the building lobby really, really wanted to see her.

  Tightening the sash of her bathrobe, she set the box of Cheerios on the counter and pressed the button to speak through the intercom. Before she could say a word, Joffe’s voice came through the speaker, sounding tinny and adenoidal. “Julia? I need to see you. It’s important.”

  She wasn’t sure she’d ever told him her exact address. But he was a reporter. He knew how to find things out.

  “Julia, are you there?”

  “I’m here.” She sighed.

  “I’ve got breakfast with me. From Bloom’s. I’ve got four bagels, a tub of cream cheese and a quarter pound of smoked Nova. And two large coffees. Let me come up.”

  Her gaze wandered to the Cheerios. Joffe had lox. If she had eggs, she could make lox and eggs. It wouldn’t taste as good as Lyndon’s, and she hadn’t bought eggs in months, so if she had any they weren’t going to be fresh.

  Still, she could warm the bagels, and he had hot coffee. She hadn’t even inserted a filter in her Mr. Coffee yet.

  “Julia, are you still there?”

  The food sounded so appetizing. She felt her stomach clutch, pleading with her to release the locked inner door for Joffe. She felt another clutch lower, between her legs. A response to the prospect of breakfast from Bloom’s, she assured herself. It had nothing to do with Joffe.

  “If you don’t let me upstairs,” he threatened, “I’m going to hit every other button down here until some idiot releases the inner door for me.”

  “All right.” She pressed the button to admit him, then leaned against the wall and groaned.

  He’d said he needed to see her, it was important. Well, food was important. Maybe what he’d meant was that he had too much food to eat all by himself.

  Hell. He needed to see her because he was a man with an ego and he couldn’t bear the idea that she’d shut him out of her life. She’d been ignoring his phone messages—well, no, not ignoring them; she hadn’t been able to put them out of her mind, but she hadn’t returned his calls—so he was going to force her to acknowledge his existence by appearing before her in the flesh, bearing bagels. Men couldn’t stand being ignored.

  She shouldn’t have let him upstairs. He was going to barge in and see her in her ratty old bathrobe with her hair tangled after a night of tossing and turning, and he was going to view his invasion of her apartment as some sort of triumph. Ha, you’ve acknowledged me! he would crow. Now, stop being such a ninny about the fact that I conned your grandmother into letting me walk out of the Bloom Building armed with financial data I’m going to use in my magazine article. Wanna mess around?

  She didn’t want to mess around.

  Well, yes, she did. But not with Joffe. Not while he had the power to humiliate her store and her family in New York City’s most popular magazine.

  Her doorbell sounded. She tucked the cereal box back onto a cabinet shelf, raked one hand through her hair while the other drew the lapels of her bathrobe closer together and crossed to the door. Through the peephole, she saw Joffe’s face, distorted by the fish-eye lens. He held up a bag, and the upward-sloping Bloom’s logo swelled toward her.

  She unlatched the chain and opened the door.

  He stepped inside, and she swallowed hard. He’d brought with him not just food but warm, pulsing energy. His presence made her aware of how anemic her existence had been in the days since she’d banished him from her life. For one crazed moment, she fought the urge to fling herself into his arms and plead with him to make her feel all the things he’d made her feel before, things she’d never even sensed a glimmer of with other men.

  She diverted that impulse by grabbing the bag and carrying it into the kitchen.

  “Yeah, hi,” he said conversationally, remaining by the door. “Great to see you, too. You’re looking terrific. That bathrobe is you.”

  “If I’d known you were coming, I would have gotten dressed,” she shouted out from the kitchen.

  “Please don’t ever get dressed on my account.” He entered the kitchen, which seemed crowded enough with one person in it, but induced claustrophobia with more than one. Especially when the other person was Joffe. His blazer smelled of wet wool and his hair sparkled with raindrops. His gaze latched on to her, hot and inviting, and she fought another of those urges.

  He’d come here in the rain. He’d gone to Bloom’s, bought food and come here, without a word of complaint about the weather, because it was important.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said.

  She turned away. She didn’t want to feel kindly toward him, grateful for his having gone to so much trouble on a drizzly Sunday morning. She didn’t want him to say he missed her, because that would remind her of how much she missed him. She had missed him so much, it took some effort for her to remember why she’d been furious with him.

  “What are you going to put in your article?” she asked, trying but failing to keep her tone neutral as she pulled the bagels out of the bag and sliced them.

  “You read the rough draft.”

  “Have you changed that draft since plowing through all the intimate details of the company’s bookkeeping?”

  He swore softly. She peered over her shoulder at him. “Of course I’ve changed it. What am I, a moron?”

  “That would be one possibility.” She finished slicing the last bagel and arranged all the halves on a baking sheet, which she slid into the oven. “How bad is it going to be?”

  “If it brings tears to your eyes, they’ll be tears of nostalgia.”

  “I’m too young for nostalgia.”

  “Then you probably won’t cry.”

  “But you’re going to use the financial information my grandmother gave you in your story.”

  “The financials weren’t as bad as I thought they’d be. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, Julia. If you hadn’t acted like such a jerk—”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Refusing my calls, hiding from me…I mean, come on! What would you call that?”

  “I’d call it feeling betrayed because you obviously agreed with my grandmother that I was unable to handle things at the store, so she had to bring an outsider in.”

  “Your grandmother does believe you’re able to handle things. Why else do you think she named you the president?”

  “Because she’s a jerk. How should I know? She should have named my mother.”

  “You’re joking, right?” He approached the counter, carefully leaving some space between them as he reached into the bag and lifted out the coffees. He pried the lid off one cup and took a sip. “Your mother would have been a di
saster as president of Bloom’s.”

  Julia should have objected but she was too intrigued. “What makes you say that?”

  “She lacks the commitment.”

  “What? She’s worked hard at that store all these years—”

  “She worked hard because she thought that made her a good wife. She did it without pay because she thought maybe your father and Ida would love her for it. Do you really think she gives a flying fuck about the store? She doesn’t even eat Bloom’s food. She buys all her food at the supermarket down the street. She told me that the first time I interviewed her.”

  “Okay. My mother works at Bloom’s because she wants to be loved. I see. And when did you say you got your degree in psychology?” Indignation still didn’t come easily to Julia. What Joffe said made too much sense.

  “And your uncle Jay is the court jester. The man has the smarts but he’s too lazy. He loves working at Bloom’s as long as he can put in four-hour days and doesn’t have to sweat.” Joffe took another sip of coffee and rested his hips against the counter. “I didn’t need access to the store’s files to figure all this out. I talked to people. Lots of them. It’s clear you were the best pick to replace your father. Your grandmother knows what she’s doing.”

  “I’m sure that’s why she wants to match you up with my sister.” The fragrance of her coffee was so strong she felt a caffeine rush just from inhaling the scent.

  “All right, look. Do you want to hear what I found? Yes, you do,” he answered himself. “Where do you keep your plates?” He flung open a cabinet door, stared in apparent dismay at the sparse contents—a tub of uncooked oatmeal, a few cans of tomato soup, a jar of cinnamon and an unopened pack of sugarless gum. He shuddered, shut the door and opened another. That cabinet was filled with enough lidded plastic containers to open a Tupperware franchise—but all of them were empty. Her mother was always bestowing plastic containers on Julia, no doubt thinking that someday she would have leftovers. Perhaps someday she would.

  She opened the cabinet with the plates and handed him two. He carried them to the table in the nook off the living room that served as her dining area. She pulled the bagels out of the oven, arranged them on a third plate and opened the waxed paper wrapping of the lox. If only Lyndon were here, along with a carton of farm-fresh eggs…But this would have to do. Compared with dry cereal—in fact, compared with just about anything except Lyndon’s cooking—this was a gourmet feast.

  They settled at the table. Joffe pulled a notepad from an inner pocket of his blazer, placed it next to his plate and busied himself smearing cream cheese on a bagel half. “Okay, here’s what’s going on.” He glanced at his notes. “You’re grossing around a hundred-fifty thousand a week. That’s not bad. It could be better, but it’s not bad. Your payroll could go on a diet—not that you should fire anyone, but you’re paying way above minimum wage, even for your cashiers.”

  “Most of them have been with Bloom’s for a few years,” Julia explained, forcing herself to overcome her irritation at the fact that he knew these figures.

  “Okay, so they’ve been with Bloom’s for a few years. You’re paying them good wages, which makes them want to stay, which means you’ll keep giving them raises and you’ll never get out of this high-payroll situation.”

  “You’re saying you think I’d be better off paying lousy wages and seeing lots of turnover?”

  “No. I’m just explaining to you where your money is going. You want to pay good wages, fine. We’re just adding up the numbers.” He spread a layer of smoked salmon across the creamy surface of his bagel and took a bite. “This is great,” he commented on the food before resuming his calculations. “You’ve got some sort of creative deal going with your rent. The store is occupying prime real estate, but it pays rent to the Bloom Building, which is owned by your family. So you catch a real break there.”

  “You could put it that way,” she said, forking some lox onto her own bagel. “Or you could say the Bloom Building is taking a major hit.”

  “It’s all in the family. You can work it any way you want.”

  She nodded, bit into her bagel and sighed. “You’re right. This is great.”

  “‘Thank you, Ron, for bringing this feast,’” he coached her.

  She hadn’t wanted to smile, but she couldn’t help herself. “Thank you, Ron.”

  He smiled back. “You’re welcome. Now…” He flipped a page on his pad and skimmed what he’d scribbled there. “Your losses due to theft and spoilage are smaller than average. Spoilage is always a problem in the food business, but you aren’t doing too bad there. You could probably tweak your prices up a bit to increase your profits. Not a huge price hike, but a nickel here, a dime there. It would add up.”

  “You don’t think it would alienate shoppers?”

  “They’re used to rising prices. The prices on most items in your store haven’t risen since before your father died—and yet you’re giving all your personnel annual raises. It’s time to adjust the prices.”

  She nodded. In all her scrutiny of the financials, the possibility of raising prices had never occurred to her. She ought to thank Joffe for suggesting that.

  “So, that’s it, then? We should just raise the prices?”

  “There’s one other thing,” he said, then popped the last of his bagel into his mouth and washed it down with a slug of coffee. She waited until he was done chewing. “You’re losing three hundred dollars in merchandise every week.”

  The missing bagels. Everyone on the third floor acted as if she was crazy to care about those bagels, but if Joffe had noticed the problem, she wasn’t crazy. He could tell them she wasn’t. He could explain to her mother and uncle and accountant and assistant that three hundred a week in unaccounted-for bagels was worth noting.

  “What do you think?” she asked cautiously. “Any ideas why we might be losing this amount of merchandise on a weekly basis?”

  He eyed her over his cardboard coffee cup. “It’s pretty much the same items vanishing every week. A lot of bagels. Some cream cheese. Coffee. And then a few variants…rugelach one week—have you ever tasted the Bloom’s rugelach, by the way? They’re incredible.”

  “Yes. I’ve also tasted the stuffed cabbage,” she confessed.

  “Yeah?” His eyes glowed. “What did you think?”

  “Incredible.”

  “Okay. So sometimes rugelach are missing. Sometimes mandelbrod.”

  “Did you ever notice how mandelbrod resembles biscotti?”

  “Yeah, except our grandparents called it mandelbrod and didn’t realize you could charge an arm and a leg for stale, funny-shaped cookies. Anyway—” he reached for another bagel half “—it’s as if someone was catering a brunch every week for a hundred of his nearest and dearest friends. It’s the same basic menu each week. Brunch food.”

  “What do you think it going on?”

  “I think someone is hosting a big weekly brunch,” Joffe said.

  “Get serious.”

  “I am serious. This is too organized to be random theft. Someone is doing something specific here.” He folded his pad shut and stuffed it back into his pocket.

  “Are you going to put this in your article?”

  “Put what? That someone is systematically stealing three hundred dollars’ worth of brunch from Bloom’s every week? Why would I do that? Next thing, you’d have police crawling all over the place, trying to find a culprit.”

  “If someone’s hosting a weekly brunch…Uncle Jay,” she guessed, rolling her eyes. “I bet he’s doing something at his country club. He’s out there every Sunday, some ritzy place on Long Island. Maybe he’s showing off to all the rich snobs he golfs with, treating them all to some real food, proving to them you can run a New York deli and still be a big shot, you know? The club probably serves cucumber sandwiches and watercress, so he brings bagels to show the boys how a genuine brunch is supposed to go. I bet that’s it.”

  She waited for Joffe to sneer at her idea, the
way everyone on the third floor might, but he didn’t. “That sounds like a real possibility,” he agreed.

  “I’d like to drive out to that country club of his right now and see what kind of breakfast buffet they’ve got,” she said, so enthusiastic she grabbed a second bagel and bit into it without bothering to add cream cheese or lox. “If only I had a car. I wonder if I could rent one and get out there before he finished his eighteen holes.”

  “Not likely. It’s Sunday morning. People reserve rental cars way in advance for the weekends.”

  She sighed. “You’re right.” Aware of how dry the naked bagel was, she tossed it on her plate and stared at Joffe. “How did you get to be so smart?”

  “I was born that way,” he said, then grinned, a sizzling, seductive grin that made her wish he hadn’t pumped her full of insights into the store’s economic situation. A grin like his deserved a response—and that particular grin told her explicitly what response he wanted—but she couldn’t think about sex when she had so many other things to work through: Uncle Jay’s regular food thefts, the deli’s pricing policy and her decision to forgive Joffe.

  She wasn’t sure when she’d made that decision, or even if she consciously had. She just knew that before he’d used bagels and lox to bribe his way into her apartment she’d resented the hell out of him, and now she no longer did. Now when she looked at him she saw an ally, someone who confirmed her suspicions. Someone who didn’t think she was obsessed or insane or too detail oriented for her own good.

  She saw someone whose mind was in alignment with hers.

  “What we need to do,” she declared, “is—”

  “Take a tour of your bedroom,” he finished for her. “I missed you, Julia. I’m horny as hell. We could have spent the whole weekend trying out new positions, and instead, you were locking me out. We need to make up for lost time.”

  She laughed, even as she felt her cheeks grow hot. “One thing you stink at is sweet talk. Suggesting a tour of the bedroom and trying out new positions is not a good way to soften a woman up.”