"Oh, come on. What was that new flavor you were telling me about last week? Scallion bagels?"

"Chive."

"Same thing. What do you wanna leave that place for? They give you a nice fat salary to make chive bagels."

"I'm bored there," Casey said. He hated lying to his friend, but he wasn't ready to tell him his other reason-that if things were as bad between him and Susie as he suspected they were, he couldn't continue to work for the Bloom family.

Maybe things weren't that bad. Maybe he'd misunderstood Susie when she'd said no. He'd asked her to move in with him, and she'd said no, but maybe she'd actually meant, "No, but I love you, Casey," or "No, but ask me again next week and I'll say yes," or "I know what you mean."

Sure. There were so many different ways to interpret the word no.

"Casey, my friend." Mose leaned forward and adjusted his voice into a smooth baritone-the voice he no doubt used when he was in his office on Park Avenue South, reassuring a client while explaining to him that declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy was his best course of action. "You do not do boredom. Your brain waves move so slowly that boredom would not register on them. You don't get bored concocting new bagel flavors. I would find that boring. Most people would. Which isn't a put-down-I'm just saying, you operate on a different plane, and that's good. It's enviable. You are spared the albatross of boredom while dreaming up ways of incorporating prunes and peppermint into bagels."

"Albatross?" Casey interrupted."

Mose reverted to his familiar jive. "Something like that. Sounded good, didn't it?"

"It sounded ridiculous. So does the idea of peppermint bagels. Prunes I might consider. Raisin bagels are so popular, why not prunes? Or apricots."

"See?" Mose beamed a smile at Casey, his point apparently proven. "You love what you do. You love bagels. I give you a boring speech and you decide to make apricot bagels. You don't want to leave Bloom's-especially not to start your own catering company."

"I think I do," Casey said, wishing he sounded more positive. He slumped forward, resting his arms on his thighs and staring at a tag of graffiti someone had painted onto the asphalt near the bench. Bingo, it said. Why would anyone paint Bingo onto a schoolyard basketball court?

"You're a bagel man. You work with dough. You really want to set up shop making stuffed mushrooms and miniature egg rolls and caviar on toast points? That's not your thing, Woody."

"There's money in it."

"There're headaches in it. Catering, you're working on everyone else's hours. Kiss your nights goodbye. That's when people have catered parties, right? At night."

Casey shrugged, not seeing this as a problem. Without Susie, he would have to fill his nights somehow. Might as well fill them stuffing mushrooms.

"Your specialty is bagels. You want to go into business for yourself, go into the bagel business."

He eyed Mose, feeling a sudden pop, like a camera flash bursting through muddled darkness. He'd thought of a catering business because he'd been working after-hours for Vinnie Carasculo, who had his own catering business, one that didn't involve caviar or miniature egg rolls. Vinnie was usually hired for Italian weddings, and the most popular items on his menu were lasagna platters, stuffed manicotti, six-foot-long garlic breads and fried calamari. Casey knew how to cook all those things, so he'd figured he could run a catering business. But someone planning an Italian wedding wasn't going to hire an Irish guy named Keenan Christopher Gordon Jr. to cook the food.

But bagels. Bread. Rolls and muffins and scones. He could do that. On his own hours, too. He wouldn't be at the mercy of tantrum-throwing brides and their mothers, or biddy ladies in Jackson Heights who hosted bridge parties and refused to pay unless every last detail, from the paper napkins to the chocolate mints, was perfect. Vinnie had dealt with customers like that. Casey had witnessed a few scenes.

A bread store. He'd need a little real estate, a few ovens, vats for boiling bagel dough, flour and yeast and his imagination. He could do what he'd been doing all along for Bloom's-something he truly enjoyed-but without doing it for Susie's sister. Or her grandmother. Or for Susie herself.

She'd said no. He didn't need a map; he could find the door himself. A door that led out of Bloom's and into a bread store...Yeah, he could see it.

Three.

"She's fat," Sondra Bloom observed, her stage whisper echoing through the common room on the first floor of Adam's dorm.

"No, she's not," Susie argued, shooting Julia a look. Julia shot a look back, one of her There goes Mom, but it's not worth getting into an argument looks. They were seated on uncomfortable vinyl-upholstered sofas in the oversized, underdecorated lounge, having just sent Joffe upstairs with Adam and his girlfriend, Natasha, to make sleeping arrangements. Sondra and Grandma Ida sat across a scratched and stained coffee table from Susie and Julia. The couches seemed to have been subjected to torture by some tinhorn dictator or underground spy agency. Scuff marks on the vinyl indicated that they'd been kicked; swatches of duct tape held tears in the fabric together, and Susie could see at least three places on the arms where cigarettes had been extinguished.

Susie wanted food. She'd already searched the dorm's first floor for a vending machine, but couldn't find one. Adam had mentioned something about a math department reception-reception meant food, didn't it?-but first Joffe had to work out his sleeping arrangements in the dorm. So Susie sat next to Julia on one of the tortured sofas and listened to her mother critique Adam's girlfriend.

"She looked fat to me," Sondra insisted.

"She's sturdy," Susie argued.

"If anyone knows from fat, it's me." Unlike her thin daughters-unlike all the thin Blooms-Sondra Bloom was cursed with the inability to burn as many calories as she wished to consume. Over the past few years, she'd developed a pear shape, her body spreading beyond its natural borders just south of her waist. Susie would call her mother sturdy more than fat, but she didn't know from fat the way her mother did. Sondra often implied that she considered herself well beyond plump and hurtling toward obese.

"If you're going to criticize Adam's girlfriend," Julia muttered, "you could start with the fact that she doesn't shave her legs."

"Tush," Grandma Ida said with a sniff. "What kind of a name is Tush?"

"Tash, Grandma," Susie said. "It's short for Natasha."

"How is Tush short for Natasha?"

"It's Tash," Julia corrected Grandma Ida.

"Go through life being called Tush? Like someone's toches? It's embarrassing!"

"She's not Jewish," Sondra hissed, her words once again resonating beyond their decibels. "A Jew wouldn't name her daughter anything that sounded like Tush."

"Who cares if she's not Jewish?" Susie snapped, managing to keep her voice lower than her mother's and grandmother's.

Her mother's eyes zeroed in on her. Sondra's hair was impeccable once again, every brown strand doing its part to create the perfect pageboy around her face. For a fifty-four-year-old woman with a pear-shaped body, she was attractive, her cheeks smooth, her forehead surprisingly unlined, her lipstick reapplied, her eyebrows gently arched when she wasn't staring hard, the way she was staring at Susie right now. The only feature that appeared out of whack was her nose, which she'd had fixed when she was sixteen. Susie had never known her mother with any other nose, but this nose looked like flesh-hued Silly Putty protruding from the center of her face, shiny and shaped to some abstract ideal, the tip too round, the nostrils too angled, the bridge too narrow.

Her glare implied that she was thinking Susie, of all people, wouldn't care if Adam's girlfriend wasn't Jewish because Susie herself was involved with the distinctly not-Jewish Casey Gordon. Of course, Sondra believed Susie was involved with Casey. Susie had no idea if that was true.

She still hadn't convinced herself that discussing her dilemma with Julia had been a wise thing; she certainly wasn't going to bring joy and satisfaction to her mother by mentioning that she and Casey were on shaky ground. Her mother probably liked Casey well enough-he made damn good bagels for the store, after all-but Susie suspected Sondra would have preferred for her to hook up with someone more affluent, more grounded, more traditional and definitely more Jewish. She never exactly came right out and said so, though, probably because she was just so relieved that her daughter was dating someone steadily. Like maybe this meant Susie was on the verge of settling down.

Which was the last thing Susie was on the verge of doing.

Adam and Joffe arrived in the common room, rescuing her from her mother's scathing frown. "Tash is going to meet up with us later," Adam announced. "She's got some stuff to do before her parents arrive. I was thinking we may as well head on over to this reception the math department is hosting."

And I'll get to eat, Susie thought. "Let's go!" she said brightly.

"So, it's all worked out for Ron tonight?" Sondra asked, rising from the sofa and then helping Grandma Ida to her feet.

"Yeah, everything's cool," Adam said, flashing a grin. "Joffe can have my bed, and I'll stay in Tash's room."

Standing behind Sondra and Grandma Ida, Julia shook her head violently, while Susie grimaced and slid her index finger across her throat.

Unfortunately, Grandma Ida's hearing suddenly recovered. "You're staying in that girl's room?" she asked Adam, her face contracting into a scowl.

"And that girl is staying with a friend," Julia said swiftly, taking Grandma Ida's elbow and steering her toward the door.

"What room? What room is Tush staying in?"

"She's staying with a friend," Julia assured her grandmother in soothing tones.

Lips pursed, Susie's mother directed her disapproval to Adam, which left Susie feeling both relieved and sympathetic. Having Adam home for the summer would be fun; he could share black-sheep duties with her. Before college, he'd been quiet, shy and well behaved. God bless Cornell for having unleashed his inner rascal.

His shoulders looked a little wider than Susie remembered. As they all exited the dorm into the sunny afternoon, she noticed that her baby brother had added a slight swagger to his walk. Arnold Schwarzenegger would never run in fear from him-well, maybe when Arnold was in his dotage Adam would have something on him-but her kid brother looked less like a boy than a man. He was graduating, after all. And he was sleeping with Tash-who was not fat, just sturdy, and would probably weigh a couple of pounds less if she shaved her legs.

Tash didn't have to be perfect for Adam. She didn't even have to be right for him. Next fall he'd be heading off to that chicken university with the Indians. Better that he should start graduate school with a little experience. Thanks to Tash, he would.

Sondra accelerated her pace to catch up with Joffe, who had accelerated his pace to catch up with Julia, who was keeping pace with Grandma Ida, who strode across the campus in a surprisingly brisk gait for an old lady. This left Susie and Adam to bring up the rear, which was fine with Susie, except that she didn't want the others to arrive at the reception ahead of her and pick the platters clean before she had a chance to grab some food. Then again, they didn't know where the reception was. Eventually, Adam would have to move to the head of their procession, and Susie would move with him.

In the meantime, they could lag and talk. "Don't discuss that you're sleeping with Tash in front of Grandma Ida," she warned.

He tilted his head slightly. He didn't exactly tower over her-Blooms were too short to tower, and even as the tallest in her family Adam was barely five foot ten-but he loomed. His Cornell T-shirt and khaki slacks bagged on him. Unlike his sweetheart, he didn't quite qualify as sturdy. "Why?" he asked. "Did Grandma Ida turn into a Republican or something?"

"I don't know if she's even registered in a party," Susie told him. "And she doesn't care what anyone does behind her back. But in front of her, you have to be tactful. The reason Joffe's sleeping in your bed tonight is that Grandma Ida was so scandalized by the thought of him sharing a hotel room with Julia."

"They're getting married."

"And I'm sure they're porking each other every chance they get. Behind Grandma Ida's back, though. That's the thing."

"She's such a busybody," Adam muttered. "How can you stand working for her?"

"I'm working for Julia, not her. She hardly ever comes to the store, and when she does, she's usually hanging off Lyndon's arm."

"Hey, she lives out of wedlock with Lyndon, doesn't she?"

Susie laughed. Lyndon was Grandma Ida's caretaker, cook and companion. He was also young, black and gay. They were not porking each other. Grandma Ida didn't even seem to mind that Lyndon porked other men without benefit of marriage. They weren't doing it in front of her, after all. And Lyndon wasn't her grandson.

"Does she hassle Rick and Neil about their love lives?" Adam asked, referring to the sons of their father's brother, Jay. Neil lived in southern Florida, where he ran a charter yacht business, sailing tourists around the Keys for an exorbitant fee. Rick lived in New York and was one of Susie's closest friends, which meant she knew more details than she wanted about his love life, and those details weren't particularly exciting. Rick was a great guy, but the majority of his love life occurred in his imagination. He'd prefer it to occur in the company of her roommate Anna. He'd probably settle for a love life with her other roommate, Caitlin, but Caitlin was so lusty she apparently scared Rick a little, and Anna was Chinese-American, which Rick found exotic.

"Or you," Adam pressed her. "Does she give you a hard time about Casey?"

"You're not listening to me, Adam. She doesn't care if her grandchildren are attending orgies every night, as long as they don't do it in front of her. In front of her, she gets upset. You don't want her to stroke out, do you?"

"Is there a real risk of that?"

She glanced up at Adam and saw that he was smirking, his brown eyes churning with laughter. "When did you get to be so snotty?" she teased.

"I'm not snotty. I'm going to go nuts this summer. She lives right above Mom. I won't be able to do anything."

Their mother occupied a lavish apartment on the twenty-fourth floor of the Bloom Building, above Bloom's. Their grandmother occupied the apartment directly above their mother's. The likelihood was far greater that Sondra would hear activity in Grandma Ida's apartment than that Grandma Ida would hear activity in Sondra's. But if Adam chose to host an orgy in their mother's apartment...The hell with Grandma Ida. Their mother would probably stroke out.

"Didn't they teach you anything about discretion at this fine institution?" she asked, waving a hand at the ivy-covered gothic halls surrounding the broad lawn across which they were ambling.

"Nothing at all." Adam sighed. "How am I going to stand living in New York this summer? I should have found a job in West Lafayette."

Susie wrinkled her nose. When she thought of Purdue, she didn't think of chickens or Indians like Grandma Ida; but she pictured wide-open spaces, flat geography, a university surrounded by nothing. Did they have poetry slams in West Lafayette? Did they have really bad plays staged in warehouse lofts, midnight showings of cheesy martial arts flicks, transvestites strolling through busy intersections and not being gawked at? Did they have genuine bagels and bialys and smoked nova, delicacies you could buy at Bloom's?

How could anyone want to spend a summer there?

"You'll have fun in New York," she consoled Adam. Even though he was bigger than her he was still her baby brother, in need of comfort. "If things get wonky at Mom's, you can probably live in Julia's apartment. She's always over at Joffe's place, anyway. You could even stay at my apartment, if you don't mind sleeping on the living-room couch."

Adam's expression was a mixture of gratitude and repulsion, as if sleeping on the couch of Susie's overcrowded East Village walk-up was no better than taking up residence in a cardboard box in an alley. True, she shared the place with two roommates. But on the other hand, they were female roommates.

"And Julia will hire you at Bloom's. She'll find you something interesting that pays good money."

"A little nepotism, eh?"

"It doesn't count as nepotism when it's a family business."

"I'm not going into the family business," Adam said firmly. "I'm going to get a Ph.D. in mathematics and then I'm going to teach. And do research. And not sell knishes."

"Big talker," Susie teased. "So how will you spend the summer, then? Hanging out in Mom's apartment and not doing anything?"

"It looks that way."

"Working at Bloom's would be better than that." Susie hooked her hand through his elbow. "You'd get to be surrounded by good food all day. Speaking of which, if there isn't any food at this math department reception, I'm going to come back outside and start eating the grass. I'm famished."

"There'll be food," Adam promised, letting her march him more rapidly down the path. "The department has to feed us. We math majors don't know how to feed ourselves. We're all nerds."

"You're not a nerd!" Maybe he had a few nerdish tendencies, but she wasn't about to let him put himself down, especially not the day before graduation.

"Don't worry. The math profs keep an eye out for us. There's always food."

"I should have majored in math," Susie said, smiling because she'd be eating soon.

Rick would rather go to his father's than his mother's for dinner, any day. For one thing, his mother served weird food-sun-dried mushroom casseroles, turnip fritters, warm sauerkraut with raisins in it. Her cuisine matched her personality, just as his father's cuisine-expensive and not too healthy, heavy on the red meat and rich sauces-matched his. For another thing, while they ate, Rick's mother would always interrogate him on what he was doing to make the world a better place-which, he had to admit-wasn't much, whereas his father would talk about frivolous things like golf and his beloved BMW Z3. For yet another, Rick's mother, Martha, was a devout feminist, whereas Rick's stepmother, Wendy, was a Barbie doll.

Most important, though, Rick was more likely to get money from his father than from his mother.

He actually wasn't totally broke at the moment. He'd managed to land a temporary job as Camera 3 for a soap opera named Passions and Power that filmed at a studio on West Fifty-second Street. The usual Camera 3 had taken a maternity leave, and a friend of a friend of a guy he knew had hired him to fill in. During the two months he'd been working at the studio, Cameras 1 and 2 got most of the action; as Camera 3, he was usually scripted to focus on some secondary character, and the director would use Camera 3 shots only when the secondary character was reacting to something the main characters were doing. Earlier that day, for instance, they'd filmed a scene in which an actress had to tell an actor that he was the father of her son. The Camera 3 script had Rick aiming at the nanny the whole time. At the end of a four-minute scene, Camera 3 was activated for a two-second shot of the nanny hugging a heavily swaddled doll to her bulbous chest and looking shocked.

But the job paid, so Rick wasn't complaining.

Tonight was going to be a much bigger payday, though. Rick had a plan, one that was going to get his father seriously jazzed.

He arrived at the ritzy Upper East Side building where his father and Wendy lived. Rick and his brother, Neil, had grown up across town, in the apartment building above Bloom's, just down the hall from Uncle Ben and Aunt Sondra and the cousins. When Rick's parents had divorced, his mother had refused to give up the spacious apartment where she'd raised her sons, so his father had moved across town and bought an apartment just as big in a sleek new building.

This was why having money was good, Rick thought as he pawed his unkempt hair and smiled at the doorman in the glittery marble lobby of his father's building. Have enough money and when you get a divorce you can afford a nice apartment. Have enough money and divorce doesn't even have to enter the picture-you can afford a nice apartment, period. The one-room apartment where Rick currently lived, in a tenement around the corner from Houston Street, wasn't much bigger than a walk-in closet. The kitchen was a three-foot-wide stretch of linoleum, with a minifridge and a two-burner hot plate and microwave oven. The bathroom was so small Rick could pee into the toilet while standing in the shower. He knew this because he'd done it many times. City housing regulations required all domiciles to have a window, and Rick's was gray with soot and offered a view of a dirty brick wall.

The apartment was not a nice one, and he could barely afford it.

The doorman glowered at him from beneath the brim of his snappy militaristic cap, then buzzed upstairs to see if Jay and Wendy Bloom could possibly want this scruffy, disheveled young man to darken their doorstep. Rick imagined Wendy's sunny voice chirping into the intercom that of course Rick was welcome, she couldn't wait to see him and feed him red meat. One of Wendy's most charming traits was her enthusiasm. Give her pompoms and a short skirt and she'd be ready for anything.

The doorman lowered his intercom phone and sent Rick a reluctant nod. Grinning, Rick shuffled through the lobby to the elevators. The Velcro on one of the straps of his Teva sandals was losing its grip. That was what he got for wearing them all year long. Now, at least, the weather matched his footwear. He also had on olive-green cargo shorts and a baggy T-shirt reading, Yes, I'm Warm Enough, which he'd worn a lot that past winter, to much better effect. He was always warm. It drove his mother crazy, except for the period a few years ago when she'd been going through menopause and sweating constantly.