Susie nodded. "What I thought was, you should have a meeting."

"A meeting?"

"You know, like one of your Bloom's meetings."

When Julia had become president of Bloom's last year, she'd started chairing executive meetings. Her mother, Dierdre, Myron, Uncle Jay and sometimes Grandma Ida would attend-Susie, too, if she was involved in a Bloom's project. At first, the third-floor denizens had considered the idea of gathering everyone into the same room revolutionary, if not downright incendiary. They much preferred to shout back and forth through their open doors than sit together in the same room and talk face-to-face. Julia had brought everyone around by serving bagels at the meetings. Delicious Bloom's food had pacified them enough to let her manage the business in her own style.

Now, a year later, she didn't hold meetings as often as she used to. Things ran more smoothly at the store, and she'd finally established herself in her position as the head honcho. But every now and then, she brought Dierdre, Myron and various Blooms together in her office for a sit-down. She wished they had a conference room, but space on the Bloom Building's third floor was limited. If Susie had to write the Bloom's Bulletin from a desk tucked into an alcove in the hall, a conference room was out of the question.

"What kind of meeting?" Julia eyed the pizza box again. For some reason, she expected something to jump out of it when Susie opened it.

"A meeting of the affected parties. You, Mom, Grandma Ida-I guess Lyndon should be included, too. And Joffe, if he can make it."

"Not his father, though," Julia warned. Her mother and Norman Joffe weren't on speaking terms, after all. In truth, Julia liked the current freeze between them better than the previous heat they'd been generating.

"He won't be necessary. How about Joffe's mother?"

"She won't be necessary, either," Julia said, realizing that she had somehow come around to believing this meeting was a good idea. "Do you think she knows her ex-husband took Mom out on a few dates?" God, what if she did? Wouldn't that make for a pleasant atmosphere at the wedding? Vegas and an Elvis impersonator sounded better and better.

"Not your problem," Susie reminded her. "Forget about it. So, are you going to organize this meeting?"

"What meeting?" Sondra Bloom's voice resounded through the suite of offices.

"Wonderful," Julia muttered, kissing goodbye her hope of reviewing a report she'd received earlier that morning from her seafood manager, who was having problems negotiating with their longtime pickled-herring supplier.

"Are we having a meeting?" Myron shouted from his office. He sounded awfully eager-probably because he lived for the free bagels Julia supplied at the meetings. Pink cranberry bagels were his favorite, especially when spread with pink strawberry-flavored cream cheese.

"It's family," Julia shouted back to him. "Go downstairs and treat yourself to a bagel if you want one."

"What meeting?" Sondra shouted again. Just seconds after her voice swept through the open door she materialized in the doorway. Clad in an A-line jumper that emphasized her broad hips, she frowned at her two daughters. Ever since her latest blowup over the Plaza Hotel, frowning had been her expression du jour. "Are we having a meeting?" she asked.

"Let me call Grandma Ida," Julia said. "If she's available, we'll have a meeting."

"I don't want a meeting with her," Sondra retorted. "She conspired with my daughter behind my back."

"Mom." Julia swallowed a groan to refrain from saying what she was really thinking. Most of the words she'd need to articulate her opinions were bad, bad words.

"Mom, come with me," Susie said, hooking her arm around their mother's elbow and steering her to her own office. Over her shoulder, Susie added to Julia, "Call Grandma Ida. And Joffe, if you want him to be around for this."

Julia watched her sister and mother disappear, then leaned back in her oversized chair and groaned again, allowing a few of those bad, bad words to slip out. She didn't want a meeting. What she wanted was for her mother to let her have the wedding of her dreams. Was that really so much to ask for? She'd been a good daughter. She'd brought her mother such nachus by graduating with honors from Wellesley, then excelling in law school, then accepting a miserable job at an extremely prestigious law firm, then quitting that job to take the reins at Bloom's. She'd met a guy who was not only smart, sexy and affluent but also Jewish, and they loved each other and wanted to get married. Why wasn't that enough to satisfy her mother? Why did the Plaza have to be a part of the deal?

All right. Susie was on the case. The least Julia could do was try to set up this meeting.

She started with Grandma Ida. Lyndon answered the phone and, after checking various schedules, announced that he and Grandma Ida would both be downstairs in fifteen minutes. She dialed Ron's office and got his voice mail, then tried his cell phone and got that voice mail. She left a message about the meeting but assured him he didn't have to attend. Actually, she'd prefer for him not to come. He'd been exposed to enough mishegas with her family. Any more, and he might decide he couldn't bear to marry a Bloom.

She hung up in time to see Adam hovering in the doorway. His hair had gotten long enough that she'd asked him to start wearing a cap to work. He wasn't involved in food preparation, but she tried to keep the rules uniform among all the staff. Today he'd obliged by tucking the longer front locks behind his ears and jamming on a Yankees cap. If his hair got a little longer, he'd be able to pull it into a ponytail like Casey.

Maybe she could convince him to try Susie's salon. St. Louis? French Lick? She wished she could remember the name.

"I got this great idea," Adam said, bounding into the office as soon as he saw he had her attention. "If you organized the inventory by shelf height, you could adjust the shelves to different heights and fit more inventory onto them." He grabbed a pen from her desk and started sketching diagrams of shelf heights on the back of the envelope the report about the pickled-herring merchant had come in.

He was well into his explanation when Uncle Jay showed up. "I heard you were setting up one of your meetings," he said, sneering only the slightest bit. He thought her meetings were inane, and he'd made that opinion quite clear to her on more than one occasion, but he so enjoyed watching her spar with her mother that he attended all her meetings, apparently on the chance that he'd get to witness a fight.

"What meeting?" Adam asked, pen poised above an array of lines, arrows and numbers that resembled hieroglyphics to her. "I've heard about your meetings. Can I sit in?"

She didn't bother to ask what he'd heard, or from whom. "It's not a store meeting," she said. "It's just a family thing."

"I'm family," Uncle Jay said, strolling into the office and planting himself on the couch as though eager to reserve one of the more comfortable seats for himself.

"I'm family, too," Adam said, shooting Julia a hopeful smile.

What the hell. With all the open office doors on the third floor, and all the kibbitzing, no meeting would be private, anyhow. "If you really care that much about where Ron and I get married, be my guest," she conceded.

Adam continued drawing on the envelope for another few minutes. Then he clicked the pen shut and presented the envelope to her with a flourish. "See?" he said.

She saw an envelope covered by a lot of indecipherable jottings. "We can discuss this later," she said, thinking longingly of the report the envelope had once contained. She'd never get to it this morning, not with Adam and Uncle Jay already in her office and Grandma Ida and Lyndon heading in her direction, visible through the doorway. Grandma Ida rested her hand on Lyndon's forearm, but she was definitely moving on her own power, using him not for balance but merely as an old-fashioned escort. Not that there was much old-fashioned about Lyndon, who looked dapper in crisp olive-green trousers, a shirt with a polo-player logo embroidered onto the chest pocket and leather moccasins, his hair neatly cornrowed and his eyes sparkling as he ushered Grandma Ida into the office.

Julia wheeled her chair out from behind her desk for Grandma Ida to sit in. The chair was too big for her, but she didn't like sitting on the couch, which she said was like sinking into a vat of cold kasha.

Susie and Sondra must have watched for them from Sondra's office, because they immediately appeared on the threshold. "Is everyone here?" Susie asked as Sondra entered, plopped herself into the kasha and glowered at Julia. "Where's Joffe?"

"I left him a message. I don't know if..." Julia trailed off when she spotted Dierdre behind Susie, towering in the doorway in her stiltlike high heels.

Why not include Dierdre? She was practically family, anyway. Julia smiled limply in welcome, and Dierdre followed Susie into the room.

People took a few minutes to arrange themselves. Adam courteously sacrificed his couch seat for Dierdre. Susie usually sat on Grandpa Isaac's old desk, but the pizza box she'd brought took up most of it, so she asked Adam to drag in some chairs from another office. Julia perched herself on a corner of her desk and tried to ignore the tide of hostility surging toward her from her mother.

At last, everyone was settled. Julia turned to Susie. This meeting was her idea; she could preside over it.

"Okay," Susie said, hooking her feet around the legs of her chair, then unhooking them, then crossing one leg over the other knee and jiggling her foot. "I'm no expert on love, that's for sure."

"You're going to lecture us on love?" Sondra groaned.

"I'm an expert on love," Uncle Jay announced. "I'm married to the most wonderful lady, and that's what love is all about. Julia, are we going to have bagels at this meeting?"

Before Julia could answer, Susie continued. "I'm not an expert, but the bottom line is, Julia and Joffe are in love and they're going to get married, and if we love Julia, the most loving thing we can do is get the hell out of her way."

Well, that was blunt. Julia would have been more diplomatic, and probably less effective. Susie had never cared if her family approved of her-the butterfly tattoo on her ankle, partly visible beneath the hem of her jeans when she bounced her foot, had caused grief and wailing among the family, but Susie wore that tattoo proudly-and she wasn't aiming to win anyone's approval now.

"Who's in her way?" Sondra erupted. "We're trying to make her wedding the best day of her life."

"The best day of your life," Susie argued. "Mom, it's her wedding!"

"And her idea of a wedding is to jam a hundred fifty people into Ida's apartment? What kind of cockamamie idea is that? People will be schvitzing, they'll be spilling their drinks on the rugs, Lyndon'll be running around like a maniac trying to keep order-"

"I was under the impression I'd be a guest," Lyndon said, glancing at Julia.

"Of course. You and Howard-or whoever you'd like to bring." Julia turned to her mother. "I'm hiring people to serve and clean up."

"A hundred fifty people you're going to cram into my mother's apartment?" Uncle Jay blurted out. "What are you, crazy? We have a dozen people in the apartment for Pesach and it feels too crowded."

"That probably has to do with the identities of those people," Dierdre muttered. Julia silently agreed; when it was just the family, without non-Blooms to dilute them, their Pesach gathering could seem like a mob on the verge of rioting.

"Julia wants a wedding in my apartment. She should have it where she wants it," Grandma Ida said, pumping her hand up and down emphatically. Her gold bangle bracelets clattered.

"She has a wedding there I'm not coming," Sondra said.

Silence billowed through the room.

If Julia had half Susie's guts, she'd say, Fine. Don't come. Susie never let her loved ones blackmail her. She loved Casey, but when he'd tried to pressure her into marrying him, she'd stuck to her ideals, even at the cost of losing him. Julia should stick to her ideals, too.

But she'd always been the family conciliator, the one who knocked herself out to make everyone else happy. If sticking to her ideals meant alienating her loved ones, she wasn't sure she could do it. And the thought of her mother not attending her wedding...

"I'm not a Bloom," Dierdre said quietly, staring at Sondra with steely green eyes, "but I think you're wrong."

"You would think I'm wrong," Sondra retorted. "And guess what? Your judgment means nothing to me."

"Sondra," Uncle Jay intervened.

"Like you have anything worthwhile to add," Sondra said, twisting on the couch to face Uncle Jay. "Your son is out God knows where, burning through the store's money to make a cinematic masterpiece-"

"It's going to be good," Susie noted.

"Feh," Grandma Ida interjected. "Alfred Hitchcock, now, he's good."

Lyndon cleared his throat. "You may not be aware of this," he said, "but the roof of this building is accessible. It's got an attractive safety railing and a solid flooring. I bet a tent could be raised there."

"On the roof of the Bloom Building?"

"I've been up there. Someone's set up some picnic tables and a beach umbrella."

"Who?" Sondra looked shocked. "Isn't that trespassing?"

"I've been up there, too," Susie said. "When we were kids, Rick and I used to go there all the time. The ground is kind of tarry, though, isn't it?"

"You went up on the roof?" Sondra shrieked. "You could have fallen! You could have killed yourself!"

"It's a really sturdy railing," Susie assured her.

"How come you never took me up there?" Adam asked. He was practically pouting. "I want to see the roof."

"You could probably lay a parquet down for dancing," Lyndon suggested. "Bring up a tent, tables, chairs and parquet and you're on your way."

Julia's stomach began to unclench. The roof-with a view of the Hudson River and the sky stretching overhead. Fresh air, room to move, room to dance. They might need to get a permit; even though the Bloom family owned the building, she'd want to make sure holding a party up there was safe and legal. If it was, if she could arrange it, she and Ron could exchange vows beneath the stars. Well, beneath a chupah, but the chupah would be beneath the stars.

"Does the elevator go up to the roof?" she asked.

"The service elevator goes up to an anteroom that opens out onto the roof," Lyndon told her. "You could cart everything up there without any trouble. Then you could reserve the service elevator for your guests. If people can reserve it to move in and out of apartments, I don't see why you couldn't claim it for an evening."

The roof. The roof of the Bloom Building, with Bloom's food and Blooms and music. "Lyndon, I love you," she said.

"You've mentioned that in the past," he said, grinning slyly. "But it won't work, Julia. Stay with Ron. He's a good man."

Julia returned his smile. Indeed, everyone seemed to be smiling except her mother. "The roof of this building is not the Plaza," she grumbled.

"No," Julia said happily. "It's not."

A shadow fell across the room, and she looked toward the door. Ron stood there, slightly windblown and out of breath. "I got your message," he said. "I was doing an interview with a marketing professor up at Columbia, so..." He gazed around the room. "What did I miss?"

"We're getting married on the roof," Julia told him, pushing away from her desk and striding across the room to wrap her arms around him.

He kissed her forehead with a minimum of passion, in deference to the rapt audience watching them, and gazed into her eyes. "The roof? Do I have to parachute onto it?"

"No. There's an elevator."

He smiled and kissed her again, this time on her lips and a little less timidly. "Sounds great," he said.

For her first meeting, Susie hadn't done half-bad.

She had Julia's office to herself. Julia and Joffe had gone upstairs to check out the building's roof-and if it met with their approval, she'd consider the meeting an unqualified success, despite the fact that her mother was still fuming. Plaza, schmaza. Sondra would get over her snit. Or if she didn't, she'd be the one to suffer because of it.

Susie was not going to suffer from her mother's snit. She wasn't going to suffer from Julia's wedding. She had her own suffering to attend to, and as she lifted the many pieces of her poem from the pizza box, she found plenty of suffering in the words she'd written. On a small paper plate she'd inscribed: Bridge over river Tunnel under river Water washes through Trying to reach each other We drown.

She'd placed only one word, alone, at the center of a paper plate. She'd turned a half-used order pad into a flip book, with the word home printed first in tiny letters and then large ones, progressing from page to page until the word took up an entire order slip, and then, on the last few pages, the four letters that spelled home broke apart, so if she flipped through the pad, the word seemed to grow bigger and bigger until it burst.

On a paper towel, she'd written, Home is not a flip book.

On a waxed-paper sheet, she'd written, Home is...and then another word, which she couldn't make out because her pen hadn't worked well on the waxy surface.

Home is...what? she wondered. What had that last word been?

The ink had bled a bit on the toilet-paper squares, which were filled with screeds about how a woman didn't need a man if she had a dildo and an adequate supply of chocolate. Susie considered throwing those out, but she didn't want Julia-or, more likely, the janitorial service-to find them in the trash basket. She piled them into a gauzy stack on one side of the box, figuring she could flush them down the toilet. Male-bashing rants weren't what this poem was about.

It was about love, she thought, or more accurately, the end of love, the heartbreak of love, the loss of love. Her gaze drifted back to that waxed-paper sheet. Home is...

What the hell was home? A peanut-butter-and-fluff sandwich in a cabin by a scummy pond? An overcrowded walk-up in the East Village? Someplace with a white picket fence? A kosher-style food emporium on the Upper West Side? Was it a place that stayed the same, no matter how far a person traveled, or was it a place that changed every day?

Bloom's wasn't the same place it had been a year ago, or even yesterday. Casey's apartment had a six-foot-tall lobster in it, where once it had had no lobster. Everything stayed the same in Grandma Ida's apartment-yet she'd been willing to host Julia's wedding there.

Susie shifted plates, napkins and the box around on the desk, hoping to find a unifying concept in the words she'd written last night. She was convinced this was the most important poem she'd ever crafted, but she couldn't seem to put it together. Strange that overseeing a meeting with a bunch of Blooms had been easier than overseeing a collection of paper scraps and jottings.

Julia reentered her office alone, her hair windswept and her smile brighter than a halogen bulb. "The roof is fantastic," she said. "Even if it rains, there's plenty of room for a tent. We have to work out the details with the building's management, but if they say it's okay, it'll be a great place to have the wedding."

"Why wouldn't they say it's okay? You own the building."

"It's owned by a family trust," Julia corrected her.

"Same thing." Susie shrugged. She didn't understand the convolutions of the family's assets. She just knew that she got a small check every month that made it possible for her to afford her share of the rent on that third-floor walk-up she wasn't sure qualified as home.