"She looked like Halle Berry," Anna continued.

Shit. The most gorgeous woman in the world.

"When I asked him how come they were downtown, he said they were looking for a place to rent."

"What!" Susie couldn't contain her emotions any longer. Casey-who less than two weeks ago had asked her to be his wife-was looking for a place to rent in her neighborhood with another woman, one who just happened to resemble Halle Berry. Susie might as well not come home. She might as well drive the Truck-a-Buck van all the way to the Pacific coast, and then steer it over a cliff and into the ocean. She'd seen pictures of the coastal highway out there. Plunging over a cliff would be a piece of cake.

The hell with that. She wasn't going to kill herself over Casey, that dickhead bastard.

"What?" Rick called over to her.

"Nothing," she answered him, then glanced away before he could glimpse the tears filming her eyes. To Anna she said, "They were looking for an apartment?"

"He said a place to rent. I don't know. The woman he was with said they didn't have time to chat because they were supposed to meet someone. A prospective landlord, I figured."

Susie's tears filtered through her lashes. All the blinking in the world couldn't hold them back.

"You still there?" Anna asked.

"Why don't you talk to Rick for a minute," Susie suggested, unwilling to let Anna hear her sobbing. Before Anna could respond, Susie tossed the cell phone over Linus's prostrate body to Rick's bed.

He caught it before it hit the mattress and held it to his ear delicately, as if it were a precious artifact. "Hello?" he murmured, his mouth shaping a dopey grin. "Anna?"

Susie swung off her bed and stormed into the puny bathroom. Once she'd shut herself inside, she unrolled a strip of toilet paper and used it to blot her cheeks and blow her nose. She had to get control of herself, and quickly. Anna could probably tolerate only about five minutes of Rick's lovesick blithering before she demanded that he give the phone back to Susie.

Casey and a gorgeous black woman, moving into her cozy little Manhattan neighborhood. If he'd wanted to move to the East Village, why hadn't he ever mentioned this to Susie? Why had he stressed the idea of her moving to Queens? Why had he waxed rhapsodic about the lower rents and the bigger units in his remote borough, the open sky, the schoolyard basketball courts, the cheaper stores and relative absence of gridlock on the roads? All of a sudden, this other woman comes along and he's willing to relocate to Alphabet City? Why? Who was she?

Someone who looked like Halle Berry. That could explain a lot.

Susie sniffled a bit, blew her nose again and tossed the soggy toilet paper into the commode. Then she emerged and checked herself in the mirror above the sink. She looked nothing like Halle Berry. If she resembled anyone from the silver screen, it was Edward Scissorhands.

"Um, yeah," Rick was saying into the cell phone. "That was Susie's idea."

What was Susie's idea? Susie didn't have ideas. All she had was a hypocritical heart, one that protected itself against commitment yet shattered into a zillion pieces the moment Casey turned his attention to someone else. Any idea that might be attributed to Susie was bound to be truly wretched because she was stupid and stubborn and unforgivably shallow, and if Rick didn't realize that...

"Sure," he said. "So I guess I'll be seeing you." Smiling like someone who'd drunk several large shots of high-quality whiskey and was feeling its heavy sweetness in his veins, he handed the cell phone to Susie.

She sank onto her bed, feeling the soft cushions give beneath her. "He said it was your idea to name a giant lobster Linus?" Anna asked.

"Oh. Yeah. Our mascot." Susie heard no hint of tears in her voice, thank God.

"I thought you guys were making a movie."

"We are. Linus is apparently my costar."

"It sounds weird."

"It is weird. Life is weird. Very, very weird."

"Look, I'm sorry, maybe I shouldn't have called you. I just thought you ought to know about Casey."

"I appreciate it," Susie said. "Really." What if Anna hadn't given her a heads-up, and she'd waltzed back to New York and found Casey at the bagel counter and said, What the hell? Let's see what we can do to make this thing work, and he'd said, Too late, Susie-Halle Berry wants to marry me, and unlike you, she's ready to settle down and have a grown-up relationship. Susie would be mortified. It was better to be prepared.

"Oh, one other thing," Anna added. "The woman Casey was with? She laughed like a horse."

"Like a horse?"

"Through her nose, this neighing sound. Very horsey."

"What was she laughing about?"

"I don't remember. Something Casey said, something that wasn't all that funny."

"She obviously thought it was funny."

"Or she thought he thought it was funny, and she was doing the girlie thing and pumping his ego."

"Like a horse, huh?" Susie tried to picture Halle Berry laughing through her nose. She was only grasping at straws, but anything that made the woman just a little less irresistible in Susie's imagination was a balm to her tender feelings.

"Snorting like a bronco. It wasn't pretty."

"Thanks." Anna had probably made the horse-laughter part up. The woman undoubtedly had a laugh like tinkling crystal. But friends did what they could to sustain other friends, and Susie would be eternally grateful to Anna for lying to make Susie feel better. "If you see them again, will you let me know?"

"Of course."

"How's everything with you?"

"Same old. Rick wants to take me out for dinner when you get back to town. He says maybe he'll even have enough money to cover the bill."

"Right," Susie muttered, recalling the few times Anna had agreed to go out for dinner with Rick, only to have to pick up the tab because he was tapped out. "And maybe the ice caps will melt in the next few days and our apartment will turn into waterfront property."

"They're already melting," Anna reminded her. "Global warming is having an effect. I gotta go. I'll talk to you soon. Stay mellow, Susie."

"I will." Fat chance.

"Kiss Linus good-night for me."

Susie forced a laugh and disconnected the phone. Turning, she found Rick smiling sheepishly and gazing moon-eyed at the air molecules in front of his nose. Susie wanted to smack him, or the pink vinyl paneling on the walls, or a not-quite-dead fly staggering drunkenly along the windowsill. She was mad, she was hurting, and she wanted to lash out.

But she wasn't a lashing-out type of woman. So she only gave Rick a crooked grin and said, "Anna said I should give you a good-night kiss for her." She knew, as well as Anna did, that lying to make a person feel better wasn't such a bad thing.

Adam didn't mind working in the basement, but he would never admit to anyone with the last name Bloom that he actually enjoyed the job.

The basement was where the store's inventory was stocked. It arrived in trucks that double-parked on Broadway; the drivers sent the stock directly to the storage area via a gently sloped belt accessible through metal doors in the sidewalk. Closed, they lay flush with the sidewalk and pedestrians tramped right over them. Open, one led to a staircase into the basement and the other to a long ramp of metal cylinders that food items rolled down gently. Stuff that couldn't come down the ramp had to be brought in through the alley around the back and carted downstairs on the elevator.

Unloading items from the ramp was one of Adam's responsibilities, and-don't tell Julia-he found it fun. Bending, lifting, hoisting and sorting gave a solid workout to the muscles in his shoulders, arms and back. Maybe by the time he left for Purdue, he'd be too buff to look like a grad student in mathematics.

Hell, he'd never be that buff. But he'd be a bit stronger, and that had to be worth something.

As he lugged a crate filled with bags of gourmet pasta from the belt to the shelves where pasta was stored, he thought about buff bodies, which automatically led him to think about Elyse. He'd learned from her that ballet dancing, for all its twinkle-toes delicacy, was about as strenuous as running marathons with weights strapped to one's limbs. The male dancers boosted ballerinas into the air with less effort than Adam exerted lifting sixteen cellophane bags of Nonna Rossini's Fresh-Dried Rigatoni onto a shelf. Those ballet guys could jump higher than most track stars, too. When they wore their formfitting costumes, Adam could see their muscles bulge and flex. Ballerinas didn't bulge and flex so much; they had to stay lightweight, Elyse explained, and muscle mass weighed a lot. But even though she was only a student, she had some nice definition going for her. Her calf muscles were rock-hard ovals and her abs were as taut and rippling as wind-filled sails. He knew this because last night he'd had a chance to caress those abs and calves.

He hadn't slept with her. Yet. He had an idea of how flexible her hip joints were, because she'd sneaked him into a practice room at Juilliard. It could have passed as a small gym except for the mirrors on the walls, the waist-high railing protruding from one wall and an atmosphere that smelled more like hair gel than old sweat. She'd kicked one leg up onto the railing, said, "This is the barre," and then swooped her head down until her nose touched her knee.

Okay. Loose hips. Supple thighs. Just thinking about her pelvic elasticity turned Adam on in a major way.

They'd done some seriously intense lip locking last night. Her tongue muscles were in as good shape as her biceps and quads. When she'd sat on his lap, she'd felt featherlight. He wasn't a muscle-bound ballet dancer, but he could probably lift her pretty high without straining himself.

Unfortunately, they'd had to do this kissing in an empty practice room. Not the ballet studio she'd shown him, but a tiny soundproof booth for flute students. The room had contained two chairs and a music stand, and the walls and ceiling were coated in thick soundproofing foam. He'd felt a little claustrophobic, but once the kissing had gotten under way he'd lost his awareness of their surroundings.

He wished he could bring her back to his room. With his mother in the apartment, though, that wasn't feasible. And Elyse was living with her aunt's family on Riverside Drive and 112th while she was studying at Juilliard, and her aunt had a husband and two preteen sons, who Elyse said were really obnoxious. "They're at the age where they think farting is hilarious." Adam didn't bother to enlighten her to the fact that most boys never outgrew that stage.

Maybe if he hadn't spent so much time foreplaying with her in the flute practice room last night, he'd be feeling a little less cheerful about unloading pasta from the chute today. But honestly, working at Bloom's wasn't so terrible. As long as he didn't let his family suck him in, he'd be okay. And he liked filling his wallet with cash. One thing about Julia-she paid decent wages.

The last load of pasta came down the ramp in another crate, and Adam lugged it over to the shelf. Nonna Rossini's was only one of the brands of gourmet pasta the store carried. The old lady's cellophane bags shared shelf space with Palazzia Negri Ziti in boxes illustrated with paintings of Tuscany landscapes suitable for framing, and Segalini Lasagna in rectangular tins, and Chechi Gnocchi in rustic paper sacks. Adam was cynical enough to assume they all came from the same factory in Jersey City.

Once he'd gotten the crates unloaded onto the shelves, he pulled from his belt his inventory gizmo-it had a fancy name, itemized scanner or something like that, but Adam found gizmo easier to remember. The gizmo scanned the UPCs of all the items in inventory. As soon as he'd recorded the Nonna Rossini's shipment, he could bring the gizmo upstairs to the third floor and enter the data into a computer there so the store would know just how much of what they had in stock. Uncle Jay had set up the system at Julia's behest. Last year when Adam had worked as a stock clerk, they'd recorded all the deliveries by hand on a clipboard.

This new electronic system was an improvement, but it still seemed a bit unwieldy to Adam. Why couldn't a cheap computer be kept in the basement, networked into the third-floor computers so the stock information could be entered directly? Why trek up and down in the elevator to enter the data? Not that it was his business, not that he had any investment in how the inventory was monitored, not that he wanted to interfere with Uncle Jay's way of doing things, but if Julia was going to computerize the inventory records, why not do it right?

He could set up the software in an hour, tops, he thought, whistling Phish's "Sample in a Jar" as he scanned the bags of rigatoni with his gizmo. Julia must have a spare computer somewhere on the third floor. Adam would bet good money Myron never used the computer in his office. The man still took off his shoes and socks to add.

Not that Adam had the least bit of interest in streamlining things at Bloom's.

Hell, he could donate his laptop for the summer, and good riddance, too. The last time he'd checked his e-mail, he'd had three notes from friends and five from Tash. She qualified as a friend, of course, but reading her e-mails infused him with guilt. She was spending her days picketing the Space Needle in downtown Seattle with a group of women who felt the tower was a phallic symbol and therefore insulting to the female citizens of their fair city. This coven of picketers had dubbed themselves the Needle Needlers, and they'd gotten a decent write-up in the Post-Intelligencer, which had in turn attracted a half-dozen vituperative letters to the editor.

Tash was in her glory, having the best summer of her life. And Adam was trying to score with a ballet student at Juilliard.

The truth was, he didn't give a flying fuck about the Space Needle. He'd seen pictures of it, and the only way it could be phallic was if a guy wrapped a rubber band tightly around the middle of his schlong and glued a tiny umbrella to the tip-and glued a needle to the umbrella. The tower just wasn't prick shaped.

Another truth, while he was admitting truths to himself, was that his lap felt more comfortable with Elyse perched on it than with Tash. He had nothing against zaftig women. He'd dated Tash for more than a year. But Elyse was lighter than a dollop of Cool Whip. When she sat in his lap, his knees didn't threaten to buckle under her weight.

Guilt had never been Adam's long suit. He figured Julia claimed the monopoly on that character trait. Susie didn't do guilt, and Adam had long ago decided not to do it, either. He could spend his summer feeling like a piece of shit because he was pursuing Elyse and ignoring Tash, or he could spend his summer feeling great because he was pursuing Elyse and ignoring Tash. The second option seemed preferable.

He finished scanning, squinted at the LCD monitor on his gizmo and shook his head. Simplifying the process would save man-hours, which meant it would save money. And despite his lowly status as a summer employee, Adam was a Bloom and the company's profits were his inheritance. If he could program a computer to transmit the data from the basement to the third floor, he might ultimately wind up with just a little more money in his wallet, which was a good thing any way you looked at it.

As a committed socialist, of course, Tash would disagree.

Right now, Adam didn't care.

Ron kissed Julia's breasts. She loved when he did that, loved it so much she often found herself wondering whether nursing a baby could possibly be a sexual experience, which led to fantasies of having babies with Ron, which, given that they weren't even married yet, was definitely a dangerous track for her train of thought to speed down.

A woman shouldn't think while she was having sex.

So she closed her eyes, let her head sink deep into the pillow and ran her hands up and down his arms and across his smooth, strong shoulders while he did amazing things to her breasts with his lips and tongue. She focused on the heat of his mouth and the chill of the air, the sweet burning in her nipples, the way sensation slid between her body and his, warming her belly where his chest pressed down into it, warming her thighs as they shifted against his hips. He had such a hunky physique, and he knew just what to do with what he had, and she was the luckiest woman in the world to be engaged to him, because he wasn't just sexy, he was smart and successful and even Jewish, speaking of which, she needed to find out whether he'd gotten information on the synagogues in the area, although he'd said they might be able to set up a chupah in the reception room at the Torch Club at NYU, which meant they could skip joining a synagogue for now, although if they had children they'd really have to join one so their children could have bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs thirteen years later...

He lifted his head and peered into her eyes. "Am I losing you?"

"No, no." She sighed, raised herself enough to kiss the crown of his head and fell back against the pillow. "I was just thinking."

"Stop thinking," he ordered her, then bowed and sucked her nipple into his mouth.

Okay. She would stop thinking about anything other than the gathering tension between her legs, and the way her entire being pulled tight, wanting him, burning for him-and her cell phone beeped.

"Don't answer it," he murmured, sliding his mouth from her breasts to her midriff, licking the hollow between her ribs.

It beeped again. How could she not think when her phone was ringing? The only people who would dial her cell phone at eight at night were her relatives. They probably assumed she was just finishing dinner. She and Ron had in fact started dinner-Heat'n'Eat falafel on pita, from the store-but then he'd started playing footsie with her, and they'd decided the falafel could wait, and they'd raced into his bedroom and stripped off their clothes and...

It beeped again. "I have to answer," she said. No way was this lovemaking going to end well if her phone kept ringing.

He rolled off her and let out a ragged breath. "You should have turned your phone off."

"Now you tell me." She grabbed it from the night table and pressed the Connect button. "Hello?"

"Julia, it's Mom," her mother said. "I'm not interrupting your dinner, am I?"

"No," Julia said, not bothering to tell her what she was interrupting.

"Is Ron there?"

She glanced to her left. He was lying on his back, frowning, his penis trying to decide if it should stay aroused or give up. It fluctuated at half-mast, but when she stroked her free hand down his side it shot back to attention. "Yes, he's here," she said. "You want to talk to him?"

"No. I just wanted to let you know his father called me. We're having dinner together Saturday night."

Julia yanked her hand away from Ron and sat up. "Dinner?" she said, her voice emerging in a squeak. "Why?"

Ron couldn't help noticing her anxiety. He sat up, too, touched her shoulder, and when she turned toward him, mouthed, What's going on?

She shook her head and turned away.

"Why?" her mother echoed. "So we can eat. That's usually why people have dinner."

"I thought you wanted to lose twenty pounds before my wedding."

"Have you set a date yet?" her mother asked. "I can still eat until you set a date. Unless you're planning to get married in the next month."

"No, of course not."

Ron poked her shoulder again, and when she turned he mouthed, What?

My mother and your father, she mouthed back.

He fell back against the bed and groaned. Ignoring him, Julia said, "Where is he taking you?"

"Tavern on the Green."

Oh, God. Out-of-towners believed Tavern on the Green, tucked into a cozy corner of Central Park, was the most romantic restaurant, especially on a Saturday night. "You said yes, I take it."

"I should say no? Of course I said yes."