Love in Bloom's Page 17

  “They’re a big seller.”

  She suppressed a shudder. How many people could possibly want to buy pesto bagels? If they were a big seller, that could explain why the bagel department numbers were weird. “Well. Here’s what I want—an assortment of bagels on a platter. Do you have a platter?”

  “A cardboard tray,” he suggested, displaying for her a textured tray that looked like dried concrete.

  “Let me see if we have something nicer,” she said, then sprinted to the second floor and scoured the kitchenware department for something to serve the bagels on that would look better than dried concrete. She found a round plastic tray with a Star of David embossed at the center of it. Perhaps it would lend a certain holy flavor to her meeting.

  She carried the tray downstairs to the bagel counter. “Give me a nice selection, okay, Casey? A dozen bagels in all. And can you slice them in half for me?”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “Should I include a couple of pestos?”

  “One should be enough.” More than enough, she thought. “I’ll be back.”

  She made her way back upstairs to the kitchenware department, found an insulated coffee decanter and returned to the first floor, this time heading for the coffee department. “Please fill this up with breakfast blend,” she requested.

  She scooped a handful of half-and-half creamers into her shopping basket, then helped herself to several tubs of flavored cream cheese and grabbed a few wooden cream-cheese spreaders—which looked like mutant tongue depressors—from a cup near the heat-n-eat counter.

  Returning to the bagel counter, she found that Casey had prepared an attractively shaped mound of bagels and wrapped the tray in clear plastic. “Excellent,” she said, beaming. Had he slept with Susie yet? she wondered. Susie clearly desired him, and as a rule she threw herself at anyone she desired. Had they consummated their relationship after the seder? A little matzo, a little nookie?

  She didn’t have the guts to ask Susie, let alone Casey. She was going to ask Susie, one of these days, how she managed to treat sex so cavalierly. Not that Julia was envious, not that she intended to emulate her sister, but when a man came along who pushed one’s buttons and pulled one’s chain…

  Julia didn’t have any particular man in mind, of course.

  A full seven days had passed since Ron Joffe had pressed his lips to hers. He hadn’t called since then, hadn’t requested a second interview, hadn’t sent her a dozen red roses—which would have been a very nice gesture under the circumstances—or in any other way acknowledged that he’d kissed her in her office last week.

  Shaking off the vague dismay that enveloped her whenever she thought about him, she lugged her basket to the nearest checkout line. Ahead of her stood a boxy gray-haired lady paying for a jar of sesame butter. “This stuff is supposed to increase my life span,” she snarled at the cashier. “If I die, I expect a full refund.”

  “No problem,” the cashier said, barely disguising a yawn.

  The woman pocketed her credit card and stormed off. Julia settled her basket on the counter. “I’m Julia Bloom, the president of Bloom’s,” she told the cashier.

  The young woman’s eyes widened. “Ay! I’m sorry I didn’t answer that lady right. I know, we don’t refund stuff just because someone dies.”

  “You handled her fine,” Julia assured the young woman. “I’m going to establish an account so we can get Bloom’s coffee and bagels upstairs in the offices. I’m not sure how to do that. I’ll have to work it out.” She was the flipping president—she could work it out any way she wanted.

  “So, you want me to, like, ring this up, or you just wanna take it?”

  “Ring it up.” She couldn’t set a precedent of having people walk out of the store with unpaid-for platters of bagels. She’d pay for the feast with her credit card and then set up an account to reimburse herself. A petty-cash account or something, so the third-floor staff could get coffee from downstairs whenever they wanted it. Clerks and cashiers ought to be able to get free coffee, too, she thought.

  And she was going to run the store into bankruptcy if she wasn’t careful.

  She pocketed her receipt. Then, hooking the bag with the cream cheese and creamers over her wrist and balancing the decanter atop the peak of the bagel mountain, she exited through the back door to the elevator. She arrived at her office to find Susie already there, waiting for her.

  “You don’t have a conference room, do you,” Susie said accusingly.

  “I’ve got a couch in my office. We can drag in some chairs. You can sit on the floor.” Since Susie was wearing her black denim overalls, it didn’t seem like an outlandish suggestion. She handed the platter and decanter to Susie and dug her office key from the pocket of her blazer. “Casey’s downstairs. He asked how you were.”

  “What did you tell him?” Susie sounded a touch anxious.

  Shoving the door open with her hip, Julia lifted the coffee and the bag of cream cheese from the tray. “I told him you’d run off with a lesser European prince. What do you think?”

  “A lesser prince? Why not a top-of-the-line prince?” Susie followed Julia into the office. “How did he look?”

  “He looked like he looked at Grandma Ida’s seder, only with an apron on. After the meeting you can go downstairs and ogle him if you’d like. You’re going to be working downstairs, anyway.”

  “If I agree to work for you,” Susie warned. “I don’t know anything about redesigning stores, Julia.”

  “You design the window at Nico’s,” Julia reminded her. “That’s all you need to know. How big a difference can there be between Italian and Jewish windows?”

  “You want original poetry in Bloom’s windows?”

  “I want the windows themselves to be poetry. Here comes Mom,” she added in a tight voice as she shaped her mouth into a smile.

  Sondra Bloom seemed disgruntled by Julia’s decision to call a meeting. Julia could tell this by the clench of her mother’s teeth behind her glossy lips.

  “Hello, girls!” she said, spreading her arms to gather them in. Belatedly, she noticed that they were carrying brunch. “So we’re going to have a meeting! This is so exciting.”

  She said it with the gusto one would use to describe a sinus infection. Rather than respond, Julia arranged the food on the coffee table. She pulled the plastic wrap off the bagels and stared with mild consternation at the selection Casey had chosen. One of the bagels had a pink hue to it.

  “Cranberry,” Susie whispered, evidently figuring out what Julia was gaping at. “Casey told me they’re delicious.”

  Uncle Jay followed Sondra through the door, and Julia began to wonder whether maybe her office wasn’t as big as she’d thought it was. Susie helpfully hoisted herself to sit on Grandpa Isaac’s desk, leaving the sofa and the chairs for others. Deirdre stalked in on her porn-star high heels. Myron trudged in in his worn oxfords and immediately pounced on the bagels, grabbing the cranberry one for himself. Who would have thought he’d be so daring?

  “Let’s get this meeting started,” Jay said brusquely. “Some of us have work to do.”

  “And others of us want to go play golf,” Sondra murmured, shooting him a skeptical look. “I think it’s very nice that my daughter prepared this spread for us. She’s such a good hostess.”

  Julia glanced through the open door, hoping Grandma Ida would arrive. Telephoning Grandma Ida last night to ask her to attend had taken a significant amount of courage. “A meeting? You want a meeting? What for?” she’d asked.

  Although she’d been far from encouraging about the meeting, she did say she would come. And finally, ten minutes past the scheduled starting time, she stepped out of the elevator at the opposite end of the hallway, her hand hooked through the bend in Lyndon’s arm. Together they strode down the hall like a mismatched bride and groom, until they reached Julia’s office.

  “Nu…so everybody’s here?” Grandma Ida asked, glowering at t
he room’s occupants.

  “Now that you’re here, everybody’s here,” Julia said, her palms growing cold and slick. Oh God. She had called a meeting, and she was going to have to run it. When she’d been reveling in her power, she’d forgotten to take into account the huge responsibility that came with it. “Grandma, why don’t you sit on the couch.” She motioned for her mother to make room.

  Lyndon helped her onto the couch. “Do you want me to stay?” he asked Julia.

  “Yes,” Grandma Ida answered. She turned to Julia. “If I decide I don’t like it, he can get me out of here.”

  “I can get you out of here, too,” Uncle Jay noted.

  Grandma Ida ignored him. “What’s with all this food?”

  “It’s from downstairs,” Julia said, bracing for an attack. “If we’re going to sell food at Bloom’s, we ought to have enough faith in it to eat it ourselves.”

  “It’s too expensive,” Grandma Ida grumbled.

  Julia opened her mouth to argue, but Susie gave a slight shake of her head and Julia heeded her sister’s unspoken counsel. No sense arguing with Grandma Ida before the meeting had even begun. “Okay,” she said, gesturing Deirdre toward one of the chairs and Lyndon toward another. Perched on the desk and swinging her legs, Susie looked more comfortable than they did. “I’m the president of Bloom’s, and we have some problems.”

  “Why is Susie here?” Uncle Jay asked. He gave Susie a beaming proud-uncle smile that had all the authenticity of nondairy whipping cream, then glared at Julia.

  “I’ve commissioned Susie to help redesign the store,” Julia announced. “Starting with the windows,” she added, but she doubted anyone heard her through all the exclamations.

  “Redesigning?”

  “So what’s wrong with the way the store looks now?”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “Are these cranberries in this bagel?”

  This was not an auspicious start to her meeting. Julia wished she had a gavel. Lacking one, she clapped her hands.

  Everyone turned to her. Good. She had power, the power of the clap—and it alarmed her a little. Maybe she ought to license her hands as weapons.

  “We need to make some changes here,” she said.

  “It didn’t occur to you that Rick could redesign the store?” Uncle Jay challenged.

  “He’s a filmmaker,” Julia said, generously stretching the truth.

  “He’s visual.” Uncle Jay jabbed a finger toward his eye. “He thinks in visuals. Why Susie and not him?”

  “Susie has experience designing windows,” Julia explained, then hurried ahead. “I don’t want to start by talking about design. I want to talk about the fact that Bloom’s has been in a rut for a long time, and our earnings aren’t what they ought to be. No one has questioned what works and what doesn’t work. We’ve had innovations introduced by Uncle Jay,” she noted, nodding in his direction. He subsided and poured himself some coffee, his mouth pinched. “But we’ve got departments that are stagnant. Departments that are losing money. Bloom’s needs an overhaul.”

  “Your father,” Sondra scolded, “is spinning in his grave.” Deirdre indicated her agreement by sniffing sharply.

  “My father was a wonderful president of Bloom’s. But now I’m the president, and I think we need a face-lift and some streamlining, or we’re going to be left in the dust.”

  “What dust?” Sondra asked.

  “It’s a metaphor, Mom,” Susie told her.

  “I’ve gone through these profit-loss statements on the departments.” Julia reached for the pile of folders sitting on her desk. “But I want wiser, more experienced people to review each department’s performance closely. Mom, I want you to review the heat-n-eat department, the meats department, the fish department and the cheese department—basically, all the protein departments. Uncle Jay, I want you to review the coffee department—”

  “Wait a minute!” Sondra sent Julia a wounded look, as if she considered her daughter the worst kind of traitor. “The coffee corner is mine. It was my idea in the first place!”

  “Which is why you don’t have the objectivity to evaluate it. I’m going to have Myron assess our Internet mail-order businesses.”

  “What, are you crazy?” Uncle Jay shouted, practically leaping to his feet. He sank back into his chair and shot Myron a disconsolate look. “Nothing personal, Myron, but do you even know what the Internet is?”

  “I know what it is,” Myron said, nibbling delicately on his pink bagel. “This is good, Julia. Very good.”

  Julia felt Susie’s gaze on her, communicating, So there! Casey’s a genius. And maybe cranberry bagels were good. But the bagel department still worried her.

  “What I want,” she said, “is a one-or two-page report on each department, telling me what’s selling well, what’s underperforming and giving your suggestions for improving things. Deirdre, I want you to review all the reports and add your take on them. I’ll need this by the end of the week.”

  “The end of the week?” Sondra squawked. “Like I don’t have any other work to do?”

  “We all have lots of work to do,” Julia said. “More work than we had to do last week—because on top of what we have to do, we also have to give Bloom’s a kick in the rear end.”

  She paced to the window and paced back. Everyone, with the possible exception of Myron and Lyndon, was staring at her as if she’d sprouted a huge pimple on her forehead. Lyndon looked amused, and Myron was busy licking cream cheese off his fingers.

  “Gotham Magazine hasn’t published anything about us yet. But I have the feeling that if they do publish something it’s not going to be positive.”

  “How can you say that?” Sondra exclaimed.

  Even Deirdre shook her head. “I thought we handled that reporter pretty well.”

  “He didn’t come here to do a puff piece,” Julia said, almost adding, He came here to kiss me. But of course he hadn’t come to do that, either. His kiss had seemed like an afterthought—or perhaps an afterthoughtless—some weird impulse that had apparently startled him enough that once he’d cleared his head, he’d decided not to contact Julia again.

  “What do you think he came here for?” Deirdre asked.

  “He was looking for news. With most journalists, that means bad news. They want a story. Writing about how Bloom’s is just sailing smoothly along isn’t a story.”

  “But why would he come here and try to find bad news?” Deirdre pressed her.

  “Because it would make a good story. In fact, he didn’t just come here looking for bad news. He came here assuming he was going to find bad news.”

  “What makes you think that?” Sondra enquired, her voice shriller than usual. “Did he say something to you? He didn’t say anything to me. In fact, he gave no indication whatsoever that he knew he was going to find something bad to write about.”

  “It’s just a hunch.” More than a hunch—it was the way Joffe had unsettled Julia, the way he’d gazed at her, the way he’d asked questions she herself ought to have been asking all along, questions she was going to ask now that she’d made a commitment to the store. “I may be new to Bloom’s,” she conceded, squaring her shoulders and mustering her usually subdued self-confidence, “but I’m not new to life. I’ve worked in a law firm for two years. I have some intelligence, and I can sense things.”

  “She can sense things.” Uncle Jay snorted, reaching for a pumpernickel bagel and shaking his head. “Maybe she can read people’s auras, too, and the lumps on their skulls. I’ll tell you this, sweetheart—” he jabbed a cream-cheese applicator at Julia “—the time that reporter and I spent in my office talking about the Web site and mail-order business, there was no bad news for him. All he could see in front of him was success, success, success.” He punctuated this boast by glaring at his mother. “Success,” he concluded, just in case she’d missed his message.

  “What’s this about a reporter?” she belatedly asked, lifting dark, accusing eyes to Jul
ia.

  Julia dropped into her chair so her grandmother wouldn’t have to look up at her. “A guy from Gotham Magazine. He approached us and said he wanted to do a story about Bloom’s.” Addressing the rest of the group, she continued, “He wouldn’t have approached us if he didn’t think there was a story here. If you want good news about yourself in the media, you have to initiate it. When they come to you, it’s because they smell blood.”

  “She’s such an expert,” Sondra muttered, then sipped her coffee. “This is good,” she observed, eyeing Grandma Ida over the curved edge of her cup. “Like I should be surprised. Our coffee is so good.”

  “This reporter,” Grandma Ida asked, “why would he smell blood? Only thing you can smell at Bloom’s is cheese and hot entrées.”

  “And the coffee,” Sondra reminded her.

  “So he comes here, what? Sniffing around?”

  Julia nodded. “Exactly. Sniffing around.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because Daddy died,” Susie interjected. Everyone turned to her, and she shrugged. “The man who ran Bloom’s for twenty-five years is gone. This reporter dude probably thought he’d find some turmoil here.”

  “God knows why he’d think that,” Sondra whispered, just loud enough for everyone except Grandma Ida to hear. She turned questioningly to Lyndon, who repeated Sondra’s remark.

  “Ben is dead,” Grandma Ida declared in a ponderous tone, her hair so dark it seemed to suck in light like a black hole. “But Bloom’s lives on. This reporter, who needs him?”

  “I do,” Julia blurted out, then felt her cheeks grow warm. “We all do,” she went on, donning her best lawyer voice. “We need to examine just what’s going on with the store. If we have areas that are bleeding—or even just oozing—we need to fix them. And we need a jolt of energy. The reporter is providing it.” She resented that Joffe had been the one to jolt her—why couldn’t a cup of strong coffee do the job? Why couldn’t Heath? Why did she need a jolt at all?

  The whys didn’t matter. She did need a jolt, and whipping Bloom’s into shape would give it to her, far more effectively than any guy who could sweep in, poke around in things that weren’t his business, plant a kiss on her mouth and disappear. Whatever she needed, it sure as hell wasn’t Ron Joffe.