"What's all that?" Julia gestured toward the papers scattered across Grandpa Isaac's desk. "Are you picking through the garbage at Nico's?"

"It's the poem," Susie said, nudging the drinking-straw wrapper so it was half hidden under the box. "I'm trying to organize it. I've got to flush some of it, though."

"Flush it?"

"Promise you won't touch it," Susie said, collecting the pile of toilet-paper squares. "Promise you won't read it. It's not ready yet."

Julia pursed her lips. "I wouldn't touch it without putting on latex gloves first. I don't want to go near it."

"Good. I'll be back." Susie strode to the door, gave Julia an encouraging smile and exited into the hall, exactly as Casey exited into the hall from the office where Helen, the Human Resources person, held court.

Amazing how simply seeing him could cause the back of Susie's neck to grow steamy. Just ten paces behind her was the couch on which she and Casey had made love for the final time. She'd been feeling kind of pumped since she'd taken Rick and Anna's advice and started work on her pizza-box magnum opus, but seeing Casey deflated her like a tack puncturing a tire. She remembered the last time she'd seen him: her idiotic drive to his apartment in the middle of the night, her granting him custody of Linus and then running away. She was lucky he hadn't called the city's department of mental health to report that a crackpot was harassing him.

"Susie," he said, his gaze traveling from her face to the fluttering stack of toilet-paper squares in her hand.

"I have to flush this," she explained-as if that would reassure him of her sanity.

"We need to talk."

"Now?"

"It's a more reasonable hour than the last time we talked."

She couldn't deny that. Stuffing the toilet paper into a pocket of her jeans, she accompanied him through the hall and out of the office suite, then into the stairwell and down two flights of stairs to the first-floor landing.

This was their spot. The place where they'd first kissed. The place where they'd had some of their most important conversations. Could a stairway landing be a home? Susie wondered. This one, with its echoing walls and too-bright lighting, was probably as close as she and Casey would ever come to sharing a home.

He turned her to face him and she stared up at him, ordering herself not to let the steamy sensation journey from her nape to other parts of her anatomy. Her body ignored that mental command and grew warm and soft for him. Her cheeks flushed with heat; she wondered if they were as red as Linus.

As if he'd read her mind, he asked, "Are you going to explain the lobster to me?"

"What were you doing on the third floor?" she retorted. "Handing in your resignation?"

He opened his mouth and then shut it, evidently weighing his answer. He must have decided that she deserved an honest response. "I'll be here through the end of the month, but I need my pension money now."

"Why?"

"For my new place." He gazed past her for a second, then refocused on her. "I guess I need to tell you this. My store is going to be in your neighborhood. It's on Avenue B at Fourth Street."

"Great. I'll be sure to stop in every day," she retorted.

He ignored her sarcasm. "Bring your friends. I'll need the business."

She noticed a flicker of worry in his hazel eyes. Besides all the other emotions tangled into the world's largest string ball inside her, she still felt concern for Casey. She wanted him to be happy. She wanted things to work out for him. She despised him and wished him a lifetime of pain and suffering, but she wasn't quite done loving him yet, so she wished him good things, too. "Is your store going to succeed?"

"I sure as hell hope so." He sighed, then smiled slightly. "Mose helped me get a low-interest loan from the Small Business Administration, and I've scraped the rest of the financing together. My pension funds are part of that. Your sister..."

"My sister what?" If Julia was part of his financing, too-if she'd invested in his business-Susie would have the building's roof condemned so Julia would have to have her damn wedding at the Plaza. Or else she'd loosen a stretch of that sturdy railing and give Julia a well-timed shove.

"Your sister agreed to contract out to me as a bagel supplier. I'll still be making all the bagels for Bloom's. So there'll be some income from that. And if you come in every day, and bring your friends...Yeah, it might succeed."

She hated that he was smiling. He was too sexy when he smiled. She also hated that a part of her longed to clap her hands and cheer at the prospect of his business thriving. She hated that his eyes were too beautiful and he had that dusty-sweet flour scent, and he was so tall, and she'd kissed him here on this landing more than once, kissed him with enough heat to detonate a nuclear device, kissed him with such joy she didn't have to question the meaning of home. Home had been kissing Casey, and now she was homeless.

"She's very pretty," she said, reminding herself of why she would never kiss him again.

His smile vanished. "Who?"

"The woman at your apartment."

He rolled his eyes, as if disgusted that she'd even mention it. Oh, right. He was sleeping with Halle Berry and Susie was supposed to pretend that didn't have anything to do with her.

He dragged her back to his original question. "What the hell was the other night about? You showed up, you dumped a big synthetic lobster on me and you disappeared."

"Because you were entertaining," she explained. "I should've called first-"

"Agreed."

"But I couldn't find a parking space for the van in my neighborhood, so I figured I'd drive out to Forest Hills."

"To give me a lobster?"

"Uh-huh." She struggled to find the logic in her actions. The night she'd handed Linus over to him, it had seemed like a wise move.

"Why?"

"Because..." Because she'd wanted to tell him she loved him. Because she'd found the courage to toss aside everything she'd believed about herself, everything that mattered. And then she'd seen Halle and realized how foolish it was for her-for any woman-to sacrifice everything she believed about herself and everything that mattered for the love of a man. "Because I couldn't fit the lobster in my apartment, and Rick couldn't fit it in his," she said.

"What am I supposed to do with it?"

"Dip it in melted butter," she snapped. "You're the culinary genius. You figure it out."

She yanked open the door and stormed out into the store, passing the coffee corner, the shelves of poppy-seed cookies, the refrigerator cases of cheese and the baskets of bread. She ignored the chatter, the aromas, the browsing customers and bustling stock clerks. She ignored Morty Sugarman waving at her from the bagel counter and Rita Martinez calling out a greeting to her from behind her cash register. She didn't break stride until she was outside, standing in a summery afternoon as hot as she was.

If Bloom's was home, she thought, running away from home was a huge temptation. But she was too old to join the circus, and if she wished to drive an eighteen-wheeler to California she'd have to get a special license. Besides, her poem was upstairs, spread across the surface of Grandpa Isaac's desk.

So she walked around the corner to the building's side entrance, went inside and headed back upstairs.

Nineteen.

Rick had managed to borrow a screening room at the Fifty-second Street studio where he'd worked as Camera 3 for Power and Passion until the woman he'd been subbing for returned and he'd left to make his movie. A vast projection-screen television consumed most of one end of the room, and the floor rose from that end in shallow steps lined with upholstered purple chairs. If Susie's life had taken a different turn, she might have been intrigued by the color.

If her life had taken a different turn, she might have been gloating about the two hundred dollars she'd pocketed last night at a poetry slam where she'd taken first prize for "Losing Linus," the poem she'd read from a pizza box. She'd edited her poem profusely over the past few weeks, juggling paper plates and her order-pad flip book and even the skinny straw wrapper until she'd imposed a shape and order to the poem, and then she'd rewritten the entire thing on the inside of a clean pizza box. Nearly all the other poets at the slam had memorized their poems, but while she had most of hers committed to memory, it was a long piece and the pizza box contributed something to her recitation. She wasn't sure what, but she'd won the prize.

She should be strutting and preening. She should be psyched about viewing her star turn in Rick's movie, which he was about to screen for family members in this minitheater on the sixth floor of the TV studio building. But she was melancholy, and she took a seat near the front of the room, slid her feet out of her sandals and propped them on the edge of the chair's cushions so she could wrap her arms around her legs and rest her chin on her knees. It felt good, curling up like that, folding in on herself.

Her family left her alone, thank God. They must have chalked up her uncommunicativeness to nerves about her performance in the movie. Most of them swarmed around Rick, who wore his pretentious lens on its cord around his neck and who, after editing the film and adding music and voice-overs to the sound track, had finally shaved off his flimsy goatee. Uncle Jay hovered near Rick, his chest puffed up and his smile threatening to reshape his cheeks permanently as he kvelled over the accomplishment of his son, the auteur. Wendy flitted about, overseeing an ice chest that contained several bottles of champagne she and Uncle Jay had brought for a postscreening toast. Aunt Martha attached herself to Susie's mother. She looked less proud than apprehensive, but then, Aunt Martha didn't do positive emotions very well.

Grandma Ida was already settled into her seat at the center of the front row. She stared at the blank screen, her lips pressed together in an expression of vague malice, apparently prepared to dislike the movie. Julia and Joffe schmoozed with Adam and his spindly ballerina girlfriend, whose legs were so disproportionately long they seemed to emanate from just below her armpits.

Susie tuned them all out, sat by herself and sulked.

Her misery was her own fault. After the poetry slam last night, when she and Anna had returned to their neighborhood, she'd begged Anna to walk with her to Avenue B and Fourth. She'd been avoiding that corner for two weeks, but at half past midnight, she figured the odds of running into Casey there were negligible. The store he'd rented for his new shop was dark, and a corrugated metal gate had been rolled down and locked in place to protect the glass display windows, so she couldn't peek inside. Above the gate a new sign hung: Casey's, in large green block letters, and Gourmet Breads in smaller italic letters underneath.

Merely seeing his name was enough to throw her into a tailspin.

She didn't like the person she'd become. Even though this dark mood had spawned several other really cool poems, she'd liked herself much better when limericks had flowed easily from her word processor, and she'd enjoyed excellent sex on a regular basis, and her biggest dilemma had been which Heat'n'Eat entree to bring home for supper. She'd liked herself better when she'd been fantasizing about piloting an eighteen-wheeler across the continent, and analyzing cheesy martial arts films, and living her life as if adulthood and responsibility were light-years away, in some other galaxy.

They weren't. They were here, right beneath her feet in New York City. Casey had tried to get her to understand that, but she'd panicked and fled, and now that she'd finally acknowledged the truth it was too late.

"Okay, let's get started," Rick announced. "I've only got this room for an hour."

"I take it the infomercial isn't that long," Julia murmured somewhere behind Susie. She heard people shuffling around, the hinges of the purple chairs squeaking as people took their seats. Her left foot jiggled, but she refused to pivot in her chair and meet anyone else's gaze.

Julia and Joffe planted themselves directly behind her; when Joffe whispered to Julia that someone ought to advise Wendy to buy her blouses one size bigger, Susie heard him without having to strain. She also heard Julia's hissed response-that he shouldn't be looking so closely at her uncle's wife's bosom, and Joffe's defense-that avoiding looking at Wendy's bosom was like avoiding the smell of French fries in a McDonald's. "It's just there," he explained. "You can't escape it."

Julia whispered that he ought to avoid French fries, too, because they were high in fat and salt. Joffe whispered that if she was going to turn into a nag, he might call the wedding off. Julia whispered, "Just try it, buddy," and Joffe laughed.

Susie slouched lower in her chair.

Someone dimmed the lights, and then Rick jogged to the wide-screen TV at the front of the room, the straps of his sandals so slack they slid off his heels when he hunkered down in front of the VCR. He pushed his tape into the slot and pressed the Start button. The screen glowed blue, then filled with tweedy black-and-white static. Rick settled into a front-row seat a few chairs down from Grandma Ida and grinned.

The screen went black, then slowly, gradually warmed to orange as atonal tinkles of sound filled the room like wind chimes. The orange brightened, revealing the curved edge of a planet-Earth, if Susie wasn't mistaken.

A voice-Rick's, not hers-pontificated: "Billions of years ago, life emerged from the primordial soup. Today, soup is as important to life as it was then-except that now we eat it rather than slither out of it. Soup is what we make of it. Soup is what we put into it. Once we eat it, we're souped up.

"Soup."

The screen filled with towering white letters spelling Bloom's Soup.

"What the hell?..." Julia whispered to Joffe, who promptly shushed her.

The camera zoomed in like a rocket entering Earth's atmosphere, searching for a landing strip on the east coast of the North American continent. Music swelled as towering letters filled the screen: A Film by Rick Bloom. From another part of the screening room Susie heard her mother remark, "Someone seems pretty full of himself."

The camera zoomed in further as trees and houses and roads became decipherable. The lonely caw of a seagull resounded. The zoom stopped on a close-up of Linus lying on beach sand. Susie's toes appeared at the top of the screen, but someone not aware of what they were might assume they were smooth pink shells. Her voice took over the narration: "You know that expression, 'You are what you eat'? Well, that's kind of ironic, because I'm a Bloom and when I was growing up, I didn't eat much Bloom's food. I do now, though." The camera inched back, then panned up Susie's body. She looked wan and somber, the sea breeze tossing her hair and her eyes squinting from the glare of the sun bouncing off the white sand. "They don't sell lobster at Bloom's," she said, gesturing toward Linus at her feet. "It's not kosher."

"That's right," Grandma Ida announced into the darkness. "Lobster, it's trayf. I never in my life ate it. Or pork."

"I eat lobster, but I'm not a lobster," Susie said on camera. "So who knows? Maybe that old saying isn't true."

"You eat lobster?" Grandma Ida peered in Susie's direction. Even though Susie refused to look back at her, she felt Grandma Ida's disapproving stare. "It's trayf!"

"What does she mean, trayf?" came an unfamiliar female voice. Adam's ballerina, probably.

"This is supposed to be an infomercial," Julia muttered.

"Ah, but it's so much more," Joffe muttered back, then chuckled. Susie didn't hear any laughter from Julia.

The camera veered away from Susie to a wide shot of the ocean-that good old primordial soup. Susie felt as if the woman speaking on the beach was a stranger. The filming seemed so long ago, especially those scenes in Revere. Of course, she didn't even recognize the sun rising over the rim of the earth and the camera zooming in-stock footage Rick must have added in the editing room. But the scenes she appeared in-and the film cut to another such scene, this one featuring her surrounded by a potato field-who had she been then?

Someone afraid to admit she wanted a home. Someone who didn't even know what home was.

"Thank God she's talking about knishes," Julia grunted. "We actually sell them in the store."

"I've eaten knishes!" Wendy cried out, obviously proud of herself.

"That's a nice line, about how potatoes hug us from the inside," Joffe commented.

"Oy, with the lobster again," Grandma Ida commented as the camera filmed Linus standing in his original place, perched on a crumbling concrete pedestal at the side of the road. If Grandma Ida learned that Rick had left a hundred dollars in cash on that pedestal, she'd probably stroke out.

"I don't get it," Wendy said in a stage whisper that resonated through the room. "Why does he keep showing that ugly thing?"

"How can you say a lobster is ugly?" Uncle Jay argued. "You order lobsters in restaurants all the time."

"To eat, not to look at."

"Shh!" Martha silenced them.

Scenes unreeled before Susie. A syncopated drumbeat accompanied the section Rick had taped in downtown Boston. Susie was even more dwarfed by the skyscrapers just beyond Quincy Market than by Linus. The downtown-Boston footage faded into a night shot in which the skyscraper windows twinkled like stars. Susie was sure she'd seen that scene at the start of a TV show based in Boston, The Practice, maybe, or Boston Public, or some old rerun of St. Elsewhere. She hoped Rick knew what he was doing when it came to filching shots from other shows. Were copyright issues involved?

"How is this going to get people to come to Bloom's?" Julia asked in a low voice.

"Beats me," Joffe answered.

"I gave him twenty-five thousand dollars to make an infomercial."

"It's not bad for twenty-five thousand dollars."

"Easy for you to say. It didn't come out of your ad budget."

The Bloom's Bulletin was paid for out of the ad budget, too. Susie wondered idly whether she would get laid off because Rick's movie had devoured twenty-five thousand dollars and wasn't a proper infomercial.

The drumbeat drifted off, replaced by a lilting flute. There she was, sitting on the cabin's porch steps at Pine Haven. There she was, talking about white bread and home. There she was, looking wistful and wise. What acting! She deserved an Oscar.

The camera panned to a vista of the pond-without Linus in it, thank God. "Sometimes you just have to stop and think about what matters," she said in a voice-over. When had she spoken those words? When had she become so tritely profound?

At last Rick's voice rejoined the sound track, along with a lilting Klezmer clarinet. "Bloom's," he said. "It's about food. It's about life. It's about who we are and what we eat and why it matters." The screen faded to black and titles began to scroll: A Film by Rick Bloom. Directed by Rick Bloom. Produced by Rick Bloom. Edited by Rick Bloom. Sound Production by Rick Bloom. Cameraman: Rick Bloom. Written by Rick Bloom and Susie Bloom. Starring Susie Bloom. Narrator: Rick Bloom.

"The phrase vanity production comes to mind," Julia commented dryly, her words nearly drowned out by enthusiastic if solitary applause from farther back in the room. Aunt Martha, probably.

"Oy," Susie's mother said.