Sunglasses perched on her nose, legal pad propped on her knees, Susie tore open the wrapper of her granola bar, took a lusty bite and assured herself that it was a healthful snack, despite its chocolate coating. All those oats and nuts and fiber inside...surely that had to count for something.

She didn't like the limerick she'd come up with for the next Bloom's Bulletin. Rhyming sweet with treat was such a cliche. But the theme of the limerick was desserts, and meat just wouldn't work. The store didn't sell anything with feet still attached, and anything with feet would probably qualify as meat. She could use Heat'n'Eat, but the Heat'n'Eat products were all entrees, not desserts.

But it was too late to worry about the limerick anymore. She'd sent the text of the upcoming Bulletin to Julia's work computer last night, and while she could probably squeeze under the printer's deadline if she e-mailed Julia a new limerick tonight, she lacked the inspiration. The rhymes she came up with for sweet sucked: discreet, deplete, the enema brand Fleet. Why torture herself? Why torture Julia?

She decided to work on the film script, instead. Rick had diagrammed a bunch of scenes and shots, but when Susie had skimmed his working script yesterday, she'd discovered it alarmingly lacking in words-specifically, the words she was supposed to say on camera. "You can write that part," Rick had told her. "You know what you want to say."

She couldn't begin to guess what she wanted to say. "Tell me again why we're going to Maine?" she asked.

Rick rolled his shoulders in a lackadaisical shrug. "Food," he said.

She wished he sounded a bit more definitive. She wished he knew what the hell he was doing. While she was glad to be out of the city, riding in a truck, cruising along the Mass Pike, whizzing past fir trees and speed limit signs and SUVs with Live Free Or Die New Hampshire license plates on them, or Red Sox bumper stickers, or Harvard decals, and putting progressively more distance between herself and Casey, she couldn't shake her apprehension about this trip.

At least one positive thing would come out of it: having more distance between Casey and herself. She couldn't believe they'd banged each other on the couch in her sister's office. More than that, she couldn't believe having sex with him had been so easy. She couldn't believe it had felt so natural. She couldn't believe it had satisfied such a deep hunger, one she'd refused to acknowledge until that encounter in Julia's office.

Sex wasn't everything. It was a hell of a lot, of course, but there had to be more for a relationship to matter. With Casey, of course, there was more, a lot more: laughter and ideas and empathy, trust and shared tastes, companionship and comfort. She and Casey were out of sync, though. Their dreams didn't mesh-and dreams were much, much more important than sex.

She took another bite of her granola bar and let the chocolate melt on her tongue, gooey and sweet, with just a hint of bitter. Thank God for chocolate. When a woman had to go without sex, chocolate was like methadone-the next best thing.

"So what kind of food is in Maine?" she asked, perusing the camera shots Rick had outlined as if they were supposed to make sense to her.

"Lobster," Rick said.

"Lobster? We can't use lobster in this movie!"

He glanced over at her, his eyes obscured by his Ray?Bans, his hair clamped down beneath a cap with the bill bent into a semicircle and a Daffy Duck applique stitched onto it. He wore fraying cargo shorts and a T-shirt depicting a heap of empty Budweiser cans and the caption Cans Film Festival. Around his neck a camera lens hung on a lanyard. He'd started wearing the lens necklace right after he finished college. Susie wasn't sure what purpose it served, other than to announce to the world that he was a pretentious cineaste.

"Why can't we use lobster?" he asked, turning back to the road.

"Lobster is trayf."

"Oh, like anyone cares about that," he said with a snort. "Like Bloom's is glatt kosher."

"It's not glatt kosher," Susie said. "They sell meats that aren't kosher. They sell cheeses just one aisle over from the meats, so yes, Ricky, it's possible for a person to enter Bloom's empty-handed and emerge with a salami-and-cheese sandwich. But you can't put lobster in this film. Lobster isn't just something you can't eat with cheese. It's something you aren't supposed to eat at all."

"You eat lobster."

"Yeah, if someone else is buying." Susie loved lobster, but who could afford it and a decent hairstylist? "I'm not kosher."

"Bloom's customers aren't kosher, either."

"But the store is kosher-style. Have you ever seen them sell a lobster in there? Or even a lobster salad? Even a teeny-tiny little shrimp? Has clam chowder ever been the soup du jour?"

"Shit," Rick muttered, then shot her another look. "I was figuring on filming down on Cape Cod, doing something with clams."

"You can't," Susie said firmly. If nothing else, she would protect Julia's investment in this film. Protecting it meant not letting Rick depict Bloom's as a store that sold nonkosher delicacies. "People have this image of Bloom's as the kind of place Jews go to," she explained. "Wizened old Jews named Hymie and Rivka. Feisty, loudmouthed Jews who run unions and vote straight Democratic, no matter what. Yuppie Jews who haven't been inside a temple since their bar mitzvah, but now they've got a baby and they want to return to their roots."

"Lots of non-Jews shop at Bloom's," Rick argued.

"Of course they do-because they want that Jewish-ish experience."

"Jewish-ish?"

"You know what I mean. They don't want to go to some orthodox shul and watch men in prayer shawls daven for four hours on a Saturday morning. They just want some bagels. They consider it exotic."

"What does this have to do with lobsters?" Rick asked.

Susie had to think a minute, to remember where the discussion had started. "If you put lobsters into the Bloom's soup, it's going to make the place seem less Jewish-ish. It's going to undermine the store's identity."

"Okay. Fine." Rick brooded for a minute. "Can we use potatoes?"

"Potatoes are kosher."

"Great. Maine is full of potatoes."

Susie wrote potatoes on the top yellow sheet of the pad. He was going to use potatoes. Did he have even the slightest clue what he was going to use them for?

This road trip was a mistake. Susie's entire life was a mistake. She should have been Julia, the mature and sensible Bloom daughter, the sort of woman who, faced with the option of attending law school or getting a tattoo, would never choose the tattoo. If Susie were more like Julia, she could be planning her wedding right now, instead of fleeing to Maine with her crackpot cousin to make a movie about potatoes.

Of course, Julia was halfway to meltdown planning her wedding, so that was no bargain.

Crackpot, Susie thought. Crock-Pot. "Instead of soup, I think we should make Bloom's stew."

"What's the difference?"

"Stew is thicker," Susie told him. "Beyond that, the word resonates as a metaphor."

"A metaphor for what?"

"I don't know, but it resonates." She wrote stew on the pad. Potato stew? It sounded so bland she took another bite of her granola bar, just to remind herself what flavor was all about.

"Okay, so stew." Rick pondered the word. "So we'll start in a potato field. I thought a seaside shot would have been great-real picturesque, you know? Waves rolling in, a breeze, marsh grass, and you'd be saying something like, 'Lobster. It's great, with or without drawn butter.'"

"I'd never say anything like that. I don't even know why they call it 'drawn' butter. What's it drawn from?" She shook her head. "I'd probably say something along the lines of how ugly lobsters are. I mean, what could have possessed the first person who ate a lobster? He pulled this ugly green beast out of the ocean. The normal reaction would be to throw the thing away, and he'd probably still have nightmares about it for a few days. Instead, this mook tosses the thing into a pot of boiling water, and when it turns red he pulls it out, cracks the shell open and discovers it's pretty tasty?"

"Yeah, and thinks to dip it in drawn butter, too," Rick added.

"It's just weird. If you didn't know what a lobster was, would you eat it?"

"If you didn't know what a potato was, would you eat it?" Rick countered. "They grow in the ground. They're dirty and lumpy and gray. And if you bite into one raw, it tastes pasty. How did they figure out baked potatoes were the way to go?"

"Yeah, or latkes," Susie said, jotting notes. This was a promising concept. "Imagine the first person who made a latke. Grating the potato, adding egg and onion and what else?"

"How should I know? I've never made latkes."

"Neither have I."

"But you're a girl." Rick grinned. "I thought girls were supposed to know how to make latkes."

She decided not to let him provoke her. "Flour, I think. Or matzo meal. I could phone Lyndon and ask him to ask his friend Howard. Lyndon and Howard aren't girls, and they know how to cook things."

"Speaking of girls, how's Anna doing?" Rick asked, his tone so casual Susie knew he was intensely interested.

Susie sighed. She truly hoped this expedition wouldn't turn into a how-can-I-get-Anna-to-like-me? marathon. "You've had a crush on her for, what, two years? Get over it, Rick."

"Why? What does she have against me?"

"Nothing. She likes you. But there's no chemistry."

"She hasn't seen my lab," he said. "Is she dating anyone else?"

Susie weighed whether to be honest or helpful. Helpful would entail nudging Rick in a new direction, helping to wean him from his Anna obsession. But she couldn't lie to her cousin. "She goes out sometimes, but nothing serious."

He relaxed visibly in his seat. "I love her hair. It's so long."

Susie ran her fingers through her cropped chin-length hair. That was such a guy thing, loving long hair. Susie had worn hers long for a while, and it had been a pain, always getting snarled, catching in the hinges of her sunglasses, taking forever to dry after a shampoo. She'd also tried a punkish cut, very short, around the time she'd gotten her tattoo. But dykes had kept coming on to her, so she'd grown it in a bit. She liked the length it was now. She'd had one of the stylists at Racine give it a trim yesterday so it would look fresh for the film. She'd even contemplated having the film's budget pay for the haircut, but twenty-five thousand dollars wasn't much. They had to make it last.

Casey liked her hair the way she wore it. He'd probably like it long, too. Or buzz-cut short. That was the problem with him-he cared more about the woman than her hair. Why couldn't he be a shallow jerk like Rick? Then Susie wouldn't be missing him so much.

Damn. They'd barely reached the New Hampshire border, and she was already missing him, languishing like a gothic heroine with consumption. Thinking about the way his hands felt in her hair caused a sharp twinge in her chest, and a softer twinge lower down. She missed him. He was the greatest single straight guy on earth, or at least in New York, and she'd walked away from him. Run away. What was wrong with her?

Potato stew. The words stared up at her from the pad. That was her life-starchy, soggy and of indeterminate taste. Casey was the finest chocolate, not this stale granola bar, not a bag of M&M's peanuts but sinfully rich Godiva. And Susie was a lobster-ugly, wrapped in a shell and distinctly unkosher. Potato stew had to be easier to digest than a lobster-and-chocolate combination plate.

"So what are we going to do about our parents?" Julia asked Ron.

He bent over to peek through the window in the microwave, which was wedged into the few square inches of counter space between the fridge and the coffeemaker in his cramped kitchen. "Heat'n'Eat something?" he asked, straightening up and sliding off his old tweed blazer. He wore T-shirts or work shirts and jeans to work, but usually with a jacket. He'd once explained to Julia that the jacket was his nod to professionalism.

She happened to know that his real nod to professionalism was the brilliant weekly business column and the occasional feature articles he wrote for Gotham magazine. But jackets flattered him. They flattered him even more when he removed them.

"Heat'n'Eat stuffed cabbage," she told him, trying not to ogle him as he closed in on her by the sink, where she was transferring the mixed-greens salad she'd brought home from Bloom's onto two salad plates. "Your favorite."

"Who needs a wife who can cook when you've got one who runs Bloom's?" he teased, wrapping his arms around her from behind when she turned from him.

"Well, lucky you. You're going to wind up with a wife who runs Bloom's and can't cook. Don't evade my question. Your father is taking my mother out tomorrow. What are we going to do?"

"He's taking her out for coffee. And we aren't going to do anything."

"The whole thing just seems...icky."

"It's not icky. They're two unattached adults. What, do you think we should chaperon them?"

Actually, that wasn't a bad idea. But if Julia said so, Ron would laugh at her. He had a habit of not taking things as seriously as they ought to be taken. Like the catering for their wedding, or this potential romance between their parents.

They couldn't chaperon tomorrow's coffee date. Julia had lined up three different wedding venues for them to visit. Finding nice sites that would allow her to provide her own catering had proven a challenge, but she'd scheduled visits at a private mansion in Greenwich Village, a loft in Chelsea and another mansion on the Upper East Side. She also wanted to check out some venues in Central Park, even though liquor was prohibited from wedding receptions there.

If only she'd knuckled under to her mother, she could have reserved a banquet hall at the Plaza and left the catering and liquor to their in-house service. It would have been easier. But damn it, she was the president of Bloom's. She wished she could fit a hundred fifty people into her apartment or Ron's; then she could host the party herself.

They could probably fit a hundred fifty people into her mother's apartment, if they set up some tables in the bedrooms. But her mother would never allow that. Her brother's son, Travis, had had his bar mitzvah at the Plaza, after all. Sondra Bloom couldn't be shown up by her own brother.

Grandma Ida, though...Her apartment was just as big as Julia's mother's, clean and cheerful in a depression-era sort of way. Julia and Ron could trim their guest list down to a hundred and fit the wedding there. But with Grandma Ida, one never knew what she'd say or do. She might agree to have the wedding at her place and then change her mind after the invitations had been sent. Or she might insist that the doorman be invited, since she'd known him for decades and made several donations to the Puerto Rico Statehood and Freedom Brigade at his request.

The microwave dinged. She concluded that Ron loved Bloom's stuffed cabbage more than he loved her, based on his speed in releasing her and racing to the microwave to remove the food. She smiled, admiring his tight butt in his snug-fitting jeans and thinking, not for the first time, how amazing it was that fate had brought them together.

How did love triumph, anyway? She'd dated such a variety of losers-rich losers, struggling losers, handsome losers, selfish losers. With another woman, some of those losers might actually be winners, but with her they were duds. She'd never felt comfortable with them, never felt completely like herself. She'd never looked at their butts and fantasized about skipping dinner and dragging them to the bedroom.

She entertained that little fantasy now, but didn't act on it. If the dinner menu had been hamburgers, or peanut butter on toasted whole-wheat bread, Ron would have gladly allowed himself to be dragged. But...she just didn't want to test her hypothesis and hear Ron say, Not tonight, dear. I've got stuffed cabbage.

Ron pulled a couple of beers from the fridge, popped the caps off the bottles and set them down on the tiny table crammed into a corner of the room. He and Julia had to sit at right angles from each other because there wasn't enough room to pull the table out of the corner, but the mere presence of that table qualified the room as an eat-in kitchen. Julia's kitchen was so small she'd had to situate her dining table at one end of her living room. If they had their wedding in her apartment, they could accommodate Ron's brother and Susie, and maybe Adam, period. Sorry, they'd have to tell their parents, Grandma Ida, and all the aunts and uncles. We'd love to invite you to our wedding, but there's no room. They could exchange vows, serve a brunch of bagels and nova, bialys and creamed herring, mimosas made with fresh-squeezed orange juice and coffee made with fresh-ground beans and not have to worry about her mother flirting with his father, Uncle Jay bragging about how wonderful he and his sons were, his wife, Wendy, being prettier than the bride and Aunt Martha and Esther Joffe forming a first-wives club and trying to stab people with butter knives. No sturm und drang at the wedding. Just siblings.

Actually, that sounded like a lovely idea.

"So, did Susie get off all right today?" Ron asked.

Maybe it wasn't such a lovely idea. Susie was in the middle of some mishegas. "Yeah," Julia said, then took a sip of her beer. "She and Ricky are on their way to fame and glory." She sighed.

"You don't want them to find fame and glory?"

"I want them to make an infomercial for the store. Maybe a pilot for a Bloom's cooking show. Something we can get on to some local-access cable stations that'll hype the store. Why they have to schlep all the way to Maine to do this is beyond me."

"Maybe studio rentals are cheaper in Maine."

"Maybe." Julia didn't know much about studio rentals, or movie-making in general. She'd lopped fifteen thousand dollars off the cost estimate Uncle Jay had provided for her, partly because Uncle Jay wasn't always the most reliable person when it came to spending money and partly because his estimate was based on what Rick had told him and Rick was even less reliable. Even so, she'd handed over a nice chunk of change from the company's promotions budget, and she wanted something to show for it once the money was spent. Susie had promised to keep an eye on Rick and his expenditures, but how close an eye could she keep on them when she was in the midst of her mishegas?

"You know what?" Julia said. "My family is driving me crazy."

Ron laughed. "There's a news flash."

She took a bite of stuffed cabbage and instantly felt better. The sweet tang of the sauce, the crumbly texture of the chopped-beef-and-rice stuffing, the slippery, sour jacket of cooked cabbage leaves-it was tasty enough to soothe her. Doctors ought to prescribe it for their stressed-out patients.

Swallowing, she gazed up at Ron. He was still laughing. Not quite benignly-he didn't do benign-but more gently than she would have expected. "It's not your job to fix everything," he reminded her. "If your mother and my father screw up, that's their business. If your sister and your cousin screw up, Bloom's is out some money, so chalk it up to a bad investment and move on."

"My sister's not just screwing up," Julia explained, acknowledging her number-one worry on a long list of worries. "She's broken up with Casey, and she's miserable about it."

"It's not your problem," Ron insisted.

"Of course it's my problem! Casey works for me, and Susie is my sister. I love her and she's in pain."

"Who caused that pain?"

"Casey? Or maybe she caused it herself. I don't know," Julia reluctantly admitted.

"Then let her deal with it." He took a hefty chunk of stuffed cabbage into his mouth, chewed, swallowed and sighed contentedly. "You're the president of Bloom's, not the president of the Blooms. Relax. Let them clean up their own messes. Find something more important to worry about."

"Okay," she said, returning his smile. "I'll worry about where we should have our wedding."

Adam ought to have felt miserable, or at least something other than pleased. For one thing, he faced the dreaded prospect of sitting through a ballet. For another, he was supposed to be in love with Tash. For yet another, thanks to Elyse, he'd wound up with a summer job he didn't want.

But in spite of it all, he was pleased.