KAREN TEMPLETON

spent her twentysomething years in New York City, which provided some of the fodder for Ginger’s experiences in Loose Screws. Before that, she grew up in Baltimore, then attended North Carolina School of the Arts as a theater major. The RITA® Award-nominated author of more than ten novels, she now lives with her husband, a pair of eccentric cats and four of their five sons in Albuquerque, where she spends an inordinate amount of time picking up stray socks and mourning the loss of long, aimless walks in the rain. Visit her Web site at www.karentempleton.com.

Loose Screws
Karen Templeton

www.millsandboon.co.uk

This book is dedicated to all the crazy, courageous, unsinkable, wonderful people who live in a city that still feels like home even after many years away

and to a certain lovely, pushy editor who insisted I had this book in me.

Thanks, Gail.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Epilogue

One

First off, let me just state for the record that I didn’t fall for Greg Munson because he was successful, or handsome—even though I sure didn’t mind the dirty how-did-you-get-him? glances whenever we went out—or even to piss my mother off. I swear, his being the son of a Republican congressman was pure serendipity.

No. I fell in love with the guy because he gave me every indication that he was normal. And, since the odds of finding such a creature in this town are roughly a quadrillion to one, when he proposed, I pounced. I may not be proud of that, but hey. We’re talking survival of the species here.

And I have no doubt we might have had a very nice life together if he’d bothered to show up for the wedding.

Now, granted, it’s only been four hours since I smushed twenty-five yards of tulle into a taxi and hauled my sorry self back to my apartment from the hotel, so it’s not as if I’ve had a lot of time to figure any of this out. Not that I expect to.

For one thing, I’m not some infantile twit blinded by infatuation, a condition to which I’ve never been prone in any case. I’m thirty-one, have lived my entire life in Manhattan and endured a childhood that, trust me, taught me early on how to spot a jerk. Greg and I didn’t even date until a good two months after I first schlepped carpet and wallpaper samples up to his new Scarsdale house, didn’t sleep together for another couple months after that. I was careful. I didn’t cling. Never brought up marriage. Never demanded any more of his time than he was willing to give. If anything, he was one who seemed hot to take things to The Final Plateau.

So, nope. No clues there. Not even a crumb.

We held up the ceremony as long as we could. But I knew it was all over when, like a pair of priests being called to give last rites, my mother and grandmother appeared in the hallway outside the hotel ballroom to hold vigil with me and my two bridesmaids: my cousin Shelby (Jewish, terminally married, bubbly) and best friend Terrie (black, twice divorced, cynical). Yet, ever optimistic, I persisted in covering Greg’s butt. Not to mention my own.

“Traffic on the parkway must be horrendous this time of day,” I said brightly, ten minutes past the point where the pair of ice swans, not to mention some of the more elderly guests, were beginning to melt in the late May heat that had managed to override the hotel’s cooling system. When Terrie pointed out to me that Greg’s cell phone was like a fifth—or in his case, sixth—appendage, I averred, with only the barest hint of hysteria in my voice, that his battery must have gone dead, of course, that had to be it, because, after all, he’d helped me pick out the lousy flowers, for God’s sake, not to mention the cake and the invitations, so why wouldn’t he show up for his own goddamn wedding?

“Maybe he’sa dead?”

We all looked at my grandmother, calmly plucking at her underpants through the skirt of her new pink dress, who, being basically deaf as a post, had delivered this line loud enough to reach the Bronx.

I shot a don’t-say-it look at my mother, resplendent in some schmata straight from The Lion King. Although, frankly, as the guests began to filter out in embarrassed silence, as the judge—flanked by Phyllis and Bob Munson, Greg’s parents—mumbled his condolences, as I bleakly surveyed the lavishly decorated, now-empty ballroom, I have to admit Kill the bastard had shot to the top of my To Do list.

There’s no need for your mother to pay for the wedding, Greg had said. Between us, we can foot the expenses, right?

Considering what we were doing when he laid that proposal on the table—which, come to think of it, pretty much describes our activity at the time—he could have probably suggested just about anything and I would have agreed. But even once again clothed and in my right mind, I still thought, well…sure. We both had solid careers— Greg had made partner in his midtown law firm before thirty, and my growing client base meant I hadn’t had to furtively paw through a markdown rack in years. Although, since Greg thought we should go halfsies, it meant dipping into my savings. Okay, annihilating them. We weren’t talking city hall and a reception at Schrafft’s. But, hey, Greg Munson was the pot of gold I’d inadvertently tripped over at the end of the rainbow. It was worth it, right?

Do you have any idea how much a Vera Wang wedding dress costs?

Do you have any idea, Shelby had said, appalled, when I’d weakly insisted, my eyes locked on my enchanted reflection in the dressing room mirror, I’d be just as happy with the ivory silk shantung Ellen Tracy suit I’d tried on three days ago in Bergdorf’s, how much you’d regret blowing this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to look like a princess?

Do you have any idea, my mother had said, equally appalled, when I dragged her and Nonna into the Madison Avenue showroom to model the gown (Shelby’s princess comment having effectively annihilated my sticker shock), how many homeless people you could feed for what you just threw away on a dress you’re only going to wear once?

Damn, girl, Terrie had said, hands parked on rounded hips that have seen action in two marriages and any number of skirmishes, you actually look like you’ve got tits in that dress.

Could somebody hand me a tissue?

My mother tried to convince me to ride back uptown with her and my grandmother, spend the night with them in my mother’s Columbia University-owned apartment. Since I’d basically rather put out my own eye, I declined. Which may seem extremely disrespectful to those of you who have someone other than Nedra Cohen Petrocelli as your mother.

Okay, I suppose I’m being just the teensiest bit unfair. Nedra means well, she really does. It’s just that she tends to suck the life force out of anyone unfortunate enough to find himself or herself within a city block of her.

Sometimes, when I look at a photo of my mother when she was younger and skinnier, I swear to God it’s like looking into a mirror. The same black springy hair, dark eyes, high cheekbones, long limbs, a wide mouth that often gets us into trouble. Personality-wise, though…well, let’s just say genetics took a dive into the deep end of the pool there. While Nedra literally goes limp if she’s deprived of human company for longer than two hours, I need solitude in order to recharge. Her reaction to tragedy or stress is to invite a dozen chums over for dinner. Mine is to clutch my mortification—and in this case, a bottle of very expensive champagne—to my flat little chest (genetics played a nasty little trick on me there, too) and retreat to my lair.

A lair that, though miniscule and un-air-conditioned, I am now exceedingly glad I did not give up, even though I’d moved most of my clothes and stuff to the Scarsdale house last week (note to self: new clothes?). So. Here I sit, in a frothy heap in the center of the pseudo-Turkish rug I bought three years ago at one of those Fifth Avenue emporiums that’s been going out of business since 1973, swigging the bubbly like it’s diet Coke and entertaining myself by counting how many times my answering machine has beeped. Since I’m sure at least half the calls are from my (disgustingly stereotypical) mother, I have no interest in hearing who they’re from. Not even if one of them’s from Greg.

Especially if one of them’s from Greg.

I should really get out of the dress. It itches like hell, for one thing. But I can’t. Not yet. I know, it’s stupid. And it’s not as if I think that Greg’s suddenly going to show up, all smiles and profuse apologies, and we’ll just zip right back to the hotel and get married as if none of this ever happened. Which we couldn’t do anyway because the guests are long gone and the caterers already took away all the food and the judge had another wedding later this afternoon and I’ll never get my hair back the way Alphonse had it—

You know what really fries my clams? (I stare at the bottle as I think about this, finding a certain comfort in the predictability of the oscillating table fan’s intermittent, albeit ineffectual breeze.) Before I met Greg, I was perfectly happy. Didn’t feel like anything was missing from my life, you know? Oh, sure, I suppose I assumed I’d get married one day, since most people do, especially if they want kids. Which I do. I mean, hell, even my mother had gotten married—to my father, conveniently enough—and this is a woman who redefines the term “free radical.” But I hadn’t been stumbling around, desperately searching for my other “half” and crying in my latte because I’d reached the ripe old age of thirty without finding him. Dating has never been goal-oriented for me. No, I swear. I went out on the odd occasion, had sex on even odder ones, but you know, there’s something to be said for being able to rent any damn video you want, watching it when you want, wearing whatever you want, eating whatever you want without getting grief from whoever else is in the room with you. And if I’ve never exactly been the type to make men salivate…so what? I have a flourishing career, this fabulous East Side studio I’ve been illegally subletting for five years, and a hairdresser who hadn’t gasped in horror when I’d removed my hat that first time.

So things were fine. Before Greg, I mean. Then he goes and does this, leaving me with that fresh roadkill feeling.

But why should I feel this way? Am I any less whole than I was before four o’clock this afternoon? Is my sense of self-worth any less diminished because some idiot has seen fit to screw up my life for the foreseeable future? Is my hair kinkier, my nose bigger, my chest smaller?

I look down to check; reassured, I take another swig of champagne, right from the bottle. No muss, no fuss, no bubbles in the nose.

Hmm. I seem to have lost all feeling below my knees.

Oh, hell…there must be a hole in the screen, ’cause there’s a pissed off mosquito in here somewhere…no, wait. That’s my intercom buzzer. Which means either I ordered Chinese and don’t remember, which is very possible, or somebody—most likely my mother, which is a depressing thought—has come to bear witness to my degradation.

I hoist myself upright, willing sensation back into my feet, after which the dress and I float over to the intercom. After only three or four tries, I manage to poke the little button and grunt, “Go ’way.”

But wait. The buzzer is still buzzing. I finish off the champagne—I feel the need to interject at this point that I am not a drinker, that in fact this is the first serious alcohol to pass my lips since my cousin Shelby’s wedding in 1996, which is probably why I am seeing multiples of everything right now—on the off chance that it will clear my head. I was wrong. I also realize that the pissed-off mosquito is not trapped inside my intercom but is, in point of fact, hovering outside the front door to my apartment.

I burp delicately, gather up as much of the dress as I can catch, and embark on a zigzag course toward where I last saw the door. I possess just enough…something to peer through the keyhole. “Whoozit?”

“Ginger Petrocelli?”

I steal a moment to wonder, as I do from time to time, what on earth possessed my parents to name me Ginger, before clunking my forehead against the door and peering through the peephole, which affords me a distorted glimpse of a vaguely familiar clefted chin, hooded blue eyes and a very male hand with neatly trimmed nails clutching an official-looking ID. The guy says his own name, I think, but a fire truck chooses that moment to blast its horn eight stories below my open window, so I don’t hear it. I also almost wet my pants, which, considering the amount of champagne I have consumed, could have been disastrous.

So, I try to read the ID. Only there is no way I can focus enough to see the name, let alone the face beyond it. But I sure as hell catch the N.Y.P.D. part.

My stomach lurches. Until, always one to see the bright side to things, I console myself with the thought that at least it’s not my mother.

Ohmigod. My mother.

Images of a taxi door slamming shut on my mother’s Lion King tent and dragging her for ten blocks through midtown traffic spur me to fumble with the first of the three locks I’d bothered with when I came in—

Waaaaitaminnit.

“How do I know…” I brace one hand against the wall. When the dizziness passes, I say, “How do I know you’re really the police?”

Through the three-inch-thick door, I hear what sounds like a very patient sigh. “Dammit, Ginger—did you bother looking through the peephole? It’s Nick Wojowodski. Open up.”

With a gasp, I undo the rest of the locks and swing open the door. A hand darts out to catch me as I stumble out into the hallway, tripping over a foil-covered something on the floor and straight back to June 16, 1992. “Holy crap,” I breathe, snared in a pair of eyes the color of the New York sky that one day in October it’s actually blue.

Nicky tries valiantly not to wince from the fumes while I, equally valiantly, try not to wince from the memories.

My father’s cousin’s daughter Paula’s wedding to Nicky’s older brother Frank. I was one of twelve bridesmaids. The gowns were hideous and I was in serious vengeful mode. And old Nicky here was the best man.

Well, he sure as hell was the best man I’d ever had, up to that point. I didn’t stand a chance, not against those lethal eyes and all the champagne I’d lairped up (do we see a pattern here?) and a hundred-eighty pounds of solid, uncomplicated maleness with an equally solid, uncomplicated erection the size of Cincinnati plastered against me when we danced. Especially in light of the fact that my boyfriend…Jesus, what was his name? Doesn’t matter, I forget now, but he’d just ditched me in favor of some female Visigoth from Hunter College with serious bazongas and even more serious mutilation issues, and I was feeling lonely and horny and boring and Nicky was all too willing to do what he could to bolster my sagging self-esteem. Not to mention relieving me of my virginity, which was beginning to get a little frayed around the edges anyway.

Which he did, all righty, in a storage room about twenty paces behind the altar.

“I’ll call you,” he’d said. Only he hadn’t.

I don’t think I’ve seen Paula more than two or three times since then. We were never really close, anyway; she just asked me to be a bridesmaid to make an even dozen. Besides, she lives in Brooklyn. We do, however, touch base from time to time whenever there’s a family crisis or something, since her grandfather and my grandfather were brothers. So I know Nicky lives on the third floor of the Greenpoint house Frank’s and his grandmother left to the guys a couple years ago, that he went through the police academy, eventually became a detective. What I didn’t know was that he was assigned to the 19th Precinct. Which would be mine.

Trying to work up a good head of anger, I watch as Nicky squats down to pick up the foil-wrapped whatever, which I’m gathering is something homebaked from Ted and Randall across the hall. There’s a black satin ribbon tied around it.

Nicky straightens, frowning at the ribbon for a second before he hands me the package. I shift the empty bottle, which I can’t seem to let go of, to take it. A comforting, lemony smell drifts upward. Wow. Ted must’ve gone straight into the kitchen the minute he got home from the wedding.

“Hey, Ginger,” Nick says in this gruff-gentle voice, and the anger just goes poof along with the fear that my mother’s body parts are scattered all over 57th Street. I mean, really, like I’ve got the energy to be ticked about something that happened ten years ago when I’ve got a much juicier, more recent affront to my pride to deal with.

My eyes narrow. “Why are you here, Nicky?”

Nicky plants his hands on his hips—ever notice the interesting places men’s jeans tend to fade?—his eyes like blue flames under thick, dark blond hair, his mouth turned slightly down at the corners, and I think, is it me, or is this weird? That I’m standing here in a wedding dress my husband will not be tearing off my body tonight, holding consolatory, still-warm baked goods from my gay neighbors, whilst strolling down memory lane about a quickie in a church closet?

That I’m staring up at the iron jaw of the man who ten years ago annihilated a pair of brand-new, twenty-dollar Dior bikinis and who, it pains me to admit, I would probably allow the same privilege today? That is, if I were not of the current opinion that all men should be shot.

“Look,” the Virginator says, “this is sort of…unofficial. I’m not even on duty, in fact, but…” He grimaces. “Mind if I come in?”

I wobble out of the way, let him pass.

All available air in the apartment has just been effectively displaced. Nicky doesn’t seem to notice, probably because he’s too busy taking in my crushed-moth look, my frizzled hair, the fact that I am slightly swaying, as though to music only I can hear. He then crosses his arms and dons a troubled expression, which I decide he practices in front of his mirror at night. I also decide we are both going to pretend ten years ago didn’t happen.

“I’m really sorry,” he says, “but I gotta ask you this…the guy you were gonna marry, Greg Munson? When’d you last see him?”

I hug the bottle, tears cresting on my lower lashes. Oh, God, no. Please don’t tell me I’m a maudlin drunk. “Th-thursday night.”

“You sure about that?”

“I’m d-drunk,” I say, indignantly, still swaying, still clutching the empty bottle to my stomach. “Not lobotomized. Of course I’m sure about that.”

Nicky gently removes the bottle from my grasp, as if it’s a loaded gun, and glowers at it. “Christ. You drink this whole thing by yourself?”

“Every stinkin’ d-drop.” He suddenly tilts off to one sside, just before I feel him clasp my shoulders and turn me around, steering me toward my sofa.

“Sit,” he says when we get there.

Not that he has to ask. I drop like a stone, the dress whooshing up around me. I also feel like giggling, which, since a policeman is questioning me about my fiancé’s whereabouts, is probably an inappropriate reaction. I look up to see Nicky and his twin doing that glowering thing again, his—their—arms crossed. I will a sober expression—as it were—to my face.

“Seems nobody else has seen Munson since then, either,” he says. “His parents just filed a missing persons report. Tried to, anyway.”

I feel my eyebrows try to take flight. “Already?”

“I know, it’s premature. And probably a huge waste of time, since instinct tells me—excuse me for saying this—nothin’s happened to this guy except he got cold feet. But people like Bob Munson are very good at making waves.” Nicky glances around the studio apartment, which takes maybe three seconds. “So how come, if you were gettin’ married, all your stuff’s still here?” He looks back at me, eyes narrowed. “You don’t expect me to believe your husband was gonna move into this hamster cage with you?”

I ignore the derision in Nicky’s voice. Okay, so between all my books, my plants, the full-size drafting table, the computer and all its attendant crap, the TV and stereo, a sofa bed, two chairs, my exercise bike, a coffee table, a bistro set, and five pieces of matching, packed Lands’ End luggage, things might seem, to the uneducated eye, a little cramped.

“I decided to hang on to it, in case I needed to stay over in the city from time to time. Most of my clothes are out at our new house, howev—” My jaw drops. “You mean they think I have something to do with Greg’s disappearance?”

I’m usually a little quicker on the draw. I swear.

At that, Nicky perches on the edge of my Pier One coffee table (and if you breathe a word to my clients that my apartment is done in mass-market kitsch, you’re dead meat) and looks me straight in the eye. “What I think doesn’t matter here. God knows, it wasn’t me that came up with this asinine theory. And that’s all it is, believe me. In any case—” he digs around in his coat pocket for a scrawny little notepad and a Bic pen “—nobody’s accusin’ you of anything, okay? It’s just that, well, seeing’s as he stood you up, you do have a motive. I mean, should…”

He stops.

I grip the edge of my sofa bed (Pottery Barn, cranberry velvet, three years old) and make myself focus on Nicky until there’s only one of him. “Hey. I went ballistic back there,” I say, swatting in the general direction of midtown. “That wasn’t faked. I can’t fake anything,” I add, which gets a quick hitch of the pair of eyebrows across from me. “Besides, even I know you can’t have a murder without a bo—” I burp “—dy.”

Tell me that didn’t sound as blasé as I think it did.

Nicky is looking at me as if he’s not sure. But then he says, “Nobody’s sayin’ anything about murder, Ginger. I’m just tryin’ to fit the pieces together. All anybody wants is to find this guy and get his frickin’ father off our case.”

“Well, why point a finger at me?” Sober, I can do high dudgeon with the best of ’em. However, considering the definite possibility that my speech is slurred, I’m probably not pulling it off as well as I might have hoped. Nicky’s long, dark, silky eyelashes sidetrack me for a second, then I say, “Sure…now, I have a motive. After he stands me up. I didn’t before this afternoon. I mean, come on…why would I want to do in the man who gave me my first multiple orgasm?”

I try clamping my hand over my mouth, only I miss and smack myself in the chin.

Nicky puts his pad and pen away. And in those crystalline eyes, I see…awe. Respect. A pinch of what I’m afraid to identify as challenge. And I find myself thinking, damn, there’s all this hot, sizzling testosterone in the room, and I’m feeling really sorry for myself, which is closely followed by my wondering what might have happened if he had called me, all those years ago. Only then I remember that Nicky is a cop, for one thing, and that his family is even crazier than mine—which is going some—and that I have already had all the craziness I can stand for one lifetime. Oh, and that, according to Paula, her brother-in-law apparently has a penchant for giggly, jiggly twenty-year-olds.

And that, had events unfolded as planned, I’d be—I glance at the clock over my stove—less than fifteen hours away from my initiation into the Mile High Club.

I’d been really, really looking forward to that.

Venice, too.

“So,” Nicky says, all back-to-business. “You got an alibi for after when you last saw Munson?”

I think, a task that doesn’t usually strain me this much. “I was here, alone, most of that time. Packing and stuff.”

“Anybody see you coming in or going out?”

Again, I think. Again, I draw a blank. “I don’t think so. Sorry.”

Then the thought jumps up in my face and screams, What if Greg is dead?

I look at Nicky, feel my skin go clammy. My stomach rebels. I guess I turn green or something, because with one swift move, he grabs me and pushes me into my bathroom, where I puke out the champagne into the toilet. Which seems aptly symbolic, somehow. Afterward, Nicky hands me a cup of water to rinse my mouth, a damp cloth for my face.

I sip, mop, feel a single tear track down my cheek, undoubtedly dragging mascara behind it. Silently, Nicky steers me back out into the living room. I look at all the packed luggage and heave a great, sour-tasting sigh.

“Here,” he says behind me.

I turn, take the business card imprinted with the precinct address and phone number. “Be sure to let us know if he contacts you. Otherwise, well…just…stick around, okay?”

I languidly rustle to the door in his wake, sniffing occasionally, feeling pretty much like something freshly regurgitated myself. One slightly dented, recycled single woman, vomited back into the system to start over again. Once in the hall, Nicky turns, his heavy eyebrows knotted.

“What?” I say when the silence drags on too long.

“You gonna be okay? I mean, here by yourself?” he says, and I think, Aw…how sweet, only then he adds, “Maybe you should get your mother to come spend the night or something—”

I frown.

“—or not.”

The woman is legendary. Even after more than thirty years, my father’s family, according to Paula, still talks about my mother in hushed tones.

“My wife walked out on me three years ago,” he now says. “It sucks.”

Wife? What wife? Paula never said anything about a wife.

“Why?” I ask, because I really want to know.

Still not facing me, he shrugs, like it doesn’t matter anymore. Only his jaw is clenched. “She couldn’t deal with me bein’ a cop. Said it scared her too much. We split after less than six months.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

He nods, then says, “She’s okay, though. Got married again last year. To an accountant.” He finally turns back, for a couple seconds looking at me the way a man does when he wants to touch you but knows to do so would shorten his life expectancy. Then he says, very quietly, “I should’ve called you. After Paula’s wedding, I mean.”

Then he turns and walks down the hall. I watch him for a minute, until he gets on the elevator, after which I go back into my apartment and lean against the closed door, suddenly possessed with an inexplicable urge to sing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”

Two

“You shouldn’t trek up there by yourself,” Nedra says on the other end of the line, a scant week after my aborted nuptials. “I’m going with you.”

“Up there” is Scarsdale, where I’m about to go to pick up at least some of my clothes, as per Greg’s—who is very much alive, by the way; more on that in a minute—suggestion. Although Nedra and I have talked on the phone several times since Sunday, I haven’t yet seen her live and in person. A state of affairs that I intend to continue as long as I possibly can. Hey—I’m having enough trouble finding my own snatches of air to breathe; competing with my mother for them could be fatal. Still, for a moment, I am tempted to give in to the suggestion that I do not have the strength or enthusiasm requisite to argue. Especially since it’s my own dumb fault for telling her my plans.

Then my survival instinct saves the day with, “Over my dead body.”

This declaration, however, does not bother a woman whose idea of a hot date was being bodily dragged from the scene of a political protest. If anything, I can feel her cranking up to the challenge. I cut her off at the pass.

“This is something I have to do myself,” I say, thinking, Hmm…not bad. I pour myself a glass of orange juice, take my Pill even though I obviously don’t—and won’t—need birth control for the forseeable future. But the thought of dealing with heavy periods and cramps again, after ten years without, gives me the willies. After I swallow I say, “I’m all grown up now. Don’t need my mommy to hold my hand.”

“Did I say that? But how are you planning on lugging everything back on the train by yourself?”

So I hadn’t thought that part through. But there are times when self-preservation outweighs logic.

“I’ll manage.”

“You shouldn’t have to face That Woman alone.”

Why Nedra detests Phyllis Munson so much, I have no idea. Greg’s mother has always been gracious to mine, the few times they’ve met. But then, Phyllis is gracious to everybody. While my mother was burning bras and flags in the sixties, Greg’s mother was kissing up to pageant judges. She even made it to Atlantic City as Miss New York one year, I forget which. Something tells me she’s never gotten over not making the top ten. But my point is, I don’t think Phyllis knows how not to smile. Although you do have to wonder if all those years of just being so gosh-darn nice don’t take their toll.

In any case, things are liable to be just a bit on the tense side between Phyllis and me, since her son skipped out on our wedding and we’re both going to feel weird and not know what to say and all. Adding my mother to the mix would be like pouring hot sauce over Szechuan chicken. Besides, the last thing I need is for my mother to see how terrified I am of venturing out into the real world.

So I muster every scrap of conviction I can and say, “I’m going alone, and that’s that,” and my mother gives one of those long-suffering sighs that daughters the world over dread, then says, “Okay, fine, fine…” which of course means it isn’t fine, but she’ll deal with it. For a moment I savor the small, exquisitely precious victory. Only then she says, “You know, it’s not as if I’m going to embarrass you or anything.”

If I had the energy, I’d laugh.

“So,” she says, as if my not refuting her comment doesn’t matter, “when are you leaving?”

I hedge. “Elevenish.” My heart starts thundering in my chest. I open the freezer, find three Healthy Choice dinners, a half-filled ice cube tray, and one lone Häagen-Dazs bar. With nuts. “Maybe.” I rip off the paper, sighing at the sensation of creamy chocolate exploding in my mouth. Yes, I know it’s barely 9:00 a.m. So? “I’m not sure.” Which of course is a bold-faced lie, since if Phyllis is meeting me, obviously I can’t just mosey on up there whenever the mood strikes.

“Call me when you get back,” Nedra says, and I say “Sure,” although we both know I won’t.

I hang up and sigh, relieved to have my thoughts to myself again, hating having my thoughts to myself again. God, this is so creepy, this walking-a-tightrope-over-Niagara-Falls-in-a-dense-fog feeling. I keep thinking, if I just keep still, don’t rush things, the real Ginger will come back to play. The real Ginger will come back to life.

I’ve turned into an absolute slug. I’ve spent most of the past week on the sofa in my pj’s, scarfing down Cheetos and Häagen-Dazs and cherry Cokes whilst staring zombie-fashion at the soaps. And then there’s Sally Jesse, and Oprah, and all those morbidly fascinating court TV shows. Criminy, where do they get these people? From a cold storage locker in Area 51?

Munching away on the ice cream bar, I gaze at the wedding dress, still lolling in the middle of the floor like a wilted magnolia. I have no idea what to do with it. I can’t exactly throw it out, I certainly can’t see packing it away as a keepsake, or giving something with this much bad karma to someone else. So there it sits. With any luck the silk will eventually biodegrade, leaving behind a small, neat pile of satin-covered buttons I can just bury or something.

The tulle snags on my leg stubble as I shuffle through the dress on my way to the sofa. Guess I should shave.

Guess I should bathe.

I sink onto the sofa—my only concession to “cleaning” has been to push the bed back into the sofa sometime during the day—my mouth full of melting chocolate and ice cream. I am one miserable chick, lemme tell ya. What’s weird though, is that I actually felt better a few days ago than I do now. There was a period there—

Okay, wait. Let’s back up and I’ll fill you in.

The day after the wedding is a total loss. Whoever said champagne doesn’t give you a hangover lied. By the following day, however, I had recovered enough to face my kitchen, as well as my phone, which, when I finally got up the nerve to check, was up to twenty-five messages. A new world’s record. (I’d turned my cell ringer off, too. I figured the world could do without me for a couple days.) Gathering the tatters of my courage—and Ted’s fabulous lemon poppyseed bundt cake—I plopped my fanny up on my bar stool and pressed the play button.

The first thirteen messages, as I’d suspected, were all basically variations on the “Are you okay? Call me” theme from my mother. Then:

“Hey, Ginger, it’s Nick. Just checkin’ in, see if you heard anything. Let me know.”

“Nick.” Not “Nicky.” Got it. I also got something else, a genuine concern that wasn’t at all sexual in nature. No, really. He was family, after all, in a peripheral kind of way. And once sober, I realized my reaction to him had been due to nothing more than booze and shock. Besides, the last time I talked to Paula, she told me Nicky—Nick—had a new girlfriend, she’d met her once, she was okay but for God’s sake this was like the sixth one this year and God knew she thought the world of her brother-in-law, but when the hell was he planning on growing up, already?

Another three messages from my mother, then:

“Girl, pick up the damn phone!” Terrie. “Come on, come on…damn. I know you’re in there, probably cryin’ your eyes out, which is a shame ’cause the sorry skank ain’t worth it….”

One thing I’ll say for Terrie—there won’t be any “there are other fish in the sea” pep talks from that quarter, since as far as she’s concerned, the only thing that happens when you take fish out of the water is they start to stink.

“Okay, I guess this means you’re either sittin’ there not answering or you’ve turned off your ringer. I don’t suppose I blame you. But you just remember, if you hear this anytime in the next decade, that this is NOT your fault. Okay, baby—you give me a call when you return to the land of the living, we’ll go out and par-tay.”

Uh-huh. At that moment I’d been feeling a strong affinity with Mrs. Krupcek in 5-B who, legend has it, got stuck in the elevator for two hours one day back in the eighties when the building lost electricity and consequently peed all over herself. Nobody’s seen her leave the building since.

I haven’t called her back yet. Terrie, I mean, not Mrs. Krupcek. But Terrie will understand. I hope.

“Uh, yeah?” the next message started. “It’s Tony from Blockbuster?” At the time, I wondered which he wasn’t sure about, that his name was Tony or that he was from Blockbuster. “I’m just calling to let you know that Death in Venice is five days overdue? Okay, ’bye.”

First thought: Who the hell rented Death in Venice?

Second thought: There’s a video in here somewhere?

“Hi, honey, it’s Shelby. Are you there? Okay, I guess not. Anyway, Mark and I thought maybe you might like to come over for dinner one night this week? The kids have been asking about you. Well, okay. Love you. ’Bye.”

To answer your question, no, I didn’t accept her invitation. Although I did eventually call her back and thank her. But God knows the last thing I need right now is to spend an evening with Ozzie and Harriet Bernstein. Maybe next month. Or something.

I shoveled another bite of cake into my mouth, then:

“Hey, Ginge—”

The fork went flying as I grabbed for the phone at the sound of Greg’s voice, totally forgetting it was a message, stupid.

“…I heard via the grapevine that my father went off the deep end and called in the authorities, so I figured I’d better let everybody know I’m okay. I just couldn’t…” I heard him sigh. “Damn, there’s no easy way to do this…”

Now you have to remember that, up to this point, I had convinced myself the guy was either dead, kidnapped, or had an otherwise perfectly reasonable explanation for his vanishing act. When it was immediately obvious the first option was moot, and the second was highly doubtful—this was not someone who sounded as if a gun was being held to his head—that left me with Door Number Three. Which wasn’t looking promising, either.

“…I know you’re probably angry—okay, extremely angry.”

Yeah, okay, I’d been that a time or two in the past forty-eight hours.

“…and you have every right to be. What I did was unforgivable, and if I live to be a hundred, I’ll never completely understand why I bolted like that. No, no…that’s not entirely true. I guess I…um…panicked. About us, about getting married, about the way you’d set me up on some sort of pedestal—”

I choke on my cake.

“—and I realized I hadn’t taken the time I needed to think this through…”

By that point, my ire was beginning to perk quite nicely. I mean, hey—there was some reason why he couldn’t have arrived at this conclusion before I spent my entire life’s savings on food that nobody ever got to eat?

And what is this I set him up on some sort of pedestal crap?

“…I mean, I really didn’t see this coming, so I don’t want you to think this was all a game or anything like that. But…God, Ginge, I’m slime.”

No argument there.

“…my main regret is that I didn’t realize how I felt until I was getting ready to leave the house on Saturday. I guess I’d just gotten so caught up in…everything, I didn’t take five minutes to ask myself if I was really ready for this…”

The man is thirty-five frickin’ years old, for God’s sake. When did he think he would be ready?

“…I mean, the sex was great, wasn’t it?”

I looked over at my coffee table and sighed.

“…and who knew my parents would file a missing person’s report, for chrissake? I mean, I hope that didn’t cause you any more distress…”

Oh, no. Not at all.

“…and I hope maybe one day, we can be friends again, although I’ll completely understand if you hate my guts.”

You think?

“…anyway, I’ll settle up with Blockbuster sometime this week—”

Which answered that question. Still haven’t found that sucker, by the way.

“—if you wouldn’t mind dropping off the flick when you’re out? And I guess maybe we should arrange for you to get your things, whenever it’s convenient? Maybe you could call Mom. I mean, that would probably be easier, don’t you think?”

Hence the Scarsdale pilgrimage.

“Oh, and listen…” I heard what could pass for a heartfelt sigh. “I didn’t mean for you to get saddled with all the bills, I swear. Please, send them on to the office, okay? I promise I’ll take care of them. Well.” Throat clearing sounds. “I guess…well. ’Bye. And, Ginge?”

“What?” I snapped at the hapless machine.

“This has nothing to do with you, okay? I mean it. You’re really terrific. God, I’m sorry.”

You got that right.

After fast forwarding through the rest of the messages, all from my mother, I glanced down at the cake to discover I’d somehow eaten half of it. Not that this was really any big deal since—don’t hate me—I can eat anything I want and never gain weight (although I have a sneaking suspicion all those calories are lying around my body like a bunch of microscopic air mattresses set to inflate on my fortieth birthday). But it was all sitting at the base of my throat when I started to cry—a sobbing-so-hard-I-can’t-catch-my-breath jag that, combined with the cake residue in my mouth, made me choke so badly I thought my brain was going to explode.

Five minutes later, reduced to a limp, shuddering, sweating rag, I came to the disheartening conclusion that although eviceration with a dull knife would have been preferable to what I was feeling at that moment, I still loved the scumbag. Nearly a week later, I still feel that way. I mean, why else would I have put away a dozen bags of Cheetos? I should hate him, I know that, but I’ve never been in love before, not really, and I find it’s not something I can just turn off like a faucet. Which either makes me very loyal or very stupid. Yes, I’m hurt and furious and want to inflict serious bodily damage, but when I played back the message (oh, and like you wouldn’t?), he just sounded so upset….

Well. Anyway. I sat, still shoveling in cake and letting my emotions buffet me when the phone rang, making me jump out of my skin because I’d pushed the ringer too high. Too stunned to remember I wasn’t supposed to be answering, I picked up.

“Hey, Ginger? It’s Nick.”

Bet you saw that coming, didn’t you?

I, however, didn’t. And I thought, oh, yeah, like this is really going to make me feel better. I rammed my hand through my hair, only my engagement ring got caught in a snarl, which made me wince, which launched me into another coughing fit.

Nick asked if I was okay, but of course I couldn’t reply because I was choking to death. “Hang on,” I croaked into the phone, then lurched toward the sink, gulped down a half glass of tepid water since I’d run out of bottled. Yech.

A minute later, I picked up the phone and got out, “Guess who I just heard from?”

“I know,” Nick said. “I just got word. Munson’s fine.”

He almost sounded disappointed.

Bet Nick wouldn’t just walk away like that, I thought, only to remember that’s exactly what he’d done.

My gaze drifted to my left hand and the engagement ring the size of Queens I’d worn proudly since Valentine’s Day. Two carats, emerald cut, platinum setting. Hell, for this puppy, I’d even let my nails grow out.

I haven’t decided what to do with that, either.

But back to the phone call.

“Yeah,” I said. “Great news, huh?”

“Damn,” Nick said softly. Like it wasn’t a swear word, somehow. “What happened?”

Much to my chagrin, tears again stung my eyes. “He left a message on my answering machine. My answering machine.”

“You’re kidding me? Man, that is so lame,” Nick said, and anger tried to suck me back in. And it would have felt good, I suppose, to have just gone with the flow for a minute. But then I reminded myself of the conscious choice I made as a child, not to let my emotions control me, to make decisions based on reason and logic, not on passion and impulse.

That I am not my mother.

And at that moment tranquility rippled through me. Or it might have been a breeze from the open kitchen window. But for just a few seconds there, I felt that everything was going to be okay, that maybe the storm had tipped my boat, but it was completely within my power to right it again.

I stretched, popping the knotted-up muscles at the base of my neck. “He was very apologetic, though.” My voice seemed eerily level, even to my own ears. “I mean, he’s not sticking me with the rest of the bills or anything.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Scaring you? Why?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be incoherent and breaking things right about now?”

I wasn’t sure whether to be dumbfounded or indignant. “That would be like me saying all men sit around every Sunday afternoon, watching sports and stuffing their faces with nachos and pork rinds.”

“Yeah. So?”

I huffed a little sigh. “Greg didn’t.”

“No, all he did was go AWOL on your wedding day.”

I frowned. Just a tiny one, though. “But he said—”

“I don’t give a shit what he said. Guy doesn’t even have the balls to tell you in person. He treated you like dirt, Ginger. Like I should’ve called you after…you know. Paula’s wedding. But I didn’t. And even though I was only twenty-one and still functioning on half a brain, that still makes me scum, which I can live with. But what that guy did to you…dammit! Why aren’t you more pissed?”

“Because anger is counterproductive—”

“That’s bull. And holding it in isn’t healthy.”

“Then you must not be paying attention in those anger management classes they make you take,” I said, feeling my face redden. What the hell was this guy trying to do to me?

“Managing it isn’t the same as stifling it.”

“Speaking of stifling it—”

“I bet you’re even still wearing his ring.”

“That’s none of your bus—”

“Take it off, Ginger. Now.”

That’s when, in the process of swiping my hand across the face, I scraped my nose with one of the prongs (something I’d managed to do at least once a day since I put the damn thing on, if you want to know the truth), which was just enough to send me over the edge. So I yanked off the ring and hurled it against the counter backsplash. The clatter was surprisingly loud. And satisfying.

“Is it off?” Nick said.

“I hope you’re alone,” I said, suppressing the urge to paw through my cookbooks before the roaches carted it off (yeah, we got ’em on the East Side, but they’ve got little Louis Vuitton gold initials all over them), “because do you have any idea how your end of the conversation sounds—”

“Is…it…off?”

“You know, you’ve got a real problem with patience—”

“Goddammit, Ginger—”

“Yes, Nick. The ring is off. Happy?”

“Delirious. Did you throw it?”

I shoved my hair out of my face. “Yeah. As a matter of fact, I did—”

“Hard?”

With a weighty sigh, I hauled myself off the stool, leaned over to squint at the backsplash. Sure enough, there was a tiny scratch. Which I will swear was there when I moved in. Since I was in already in the neighborhood, I picked up the ring, then I sat back down with a grunt, twiddling the bauble between my thumb and index finger. “Hard enough.”

“Good,” Nick said, with a note of my-work-here-is-done accomplishment in his voice. “Anyway. Just wanted to touch base. Let you officially know you’re in the clear.”

“Oh. Yeah. Thanks.”

Silence strained across the line.

“So. You take care, okay? And, Ginger?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t put the ring back on.”

After he hung up, I sat and listened to the dial tone for several seconds, my body humming like I’d just had insta-sex.

So now that you’ve been treated to Day 3 of How Ginger Spent Her Honeymoon, we can skip ahead to the equally fun-filled present, where I’m doing the catatonic number in front of the tube. Nick hasn’t called since. Not that there’s any reason he should.

And the ring is safely snoozing in its little Tiffany box, tucked underneath my undies.

And, as you may have guessed, the I’m-gonna-right-this-boat feeling passed. I might have ridden the crest for a moment or two, but then the wave took me under again. I hadn’t fully realized how much I’d loathed dating until I no longer had to. The gruesome prospect of having to start over is more than I can bear thinking about.

Credits roll on the screen in front of me, which means it’s later than I thought, which means I have to face the music, or in this case the shower, and fix myself up at least enough so I don’t frighten little children when I step outside. Last time I caught my reflection, I looked like an electrocuted poodle. And I really should take the cake plate back to Ted and Randall. Maybe I’ll look sad enough that they will take pity on me and fill it up again. I’m thinking maybe chocolate-chip-macadamia-oatmeal cookies. Or brownies would be good, too…

My phone rings again. I hesitate, then answer.

“Cara?”

My heart stops. It’s my grandmother.

Who never, ever, ever makes phone calls.

“Nonna, what’s—?”

“Your mother, she is onna her way to your place. Inna taxi. But you never heard it from me.”

For about ten seconds after Nonna hangs up, I contemplate the fortuity of Greg’s not being dead and my consequent removal from the N.Y.P.D.’s suspect list because now it will take them longer to connect me to my mother’s murder. Of course, if and when they finally did, maybe Nick would have to come back and question me again—which held a definite appeal, over and above being rid of my mother—only I don’t think I could stand the look of disappointment in his eyes when he found out I dunnit. So I guess I’ll let my mother live.

And please don’t take my ramblings seriously. I can’t even set a mouse trap.

In any case, while I’ve been standing here plotting my mother’s demise, the clock has been quietly ticking away. Now I quickly calculate how long it will take a taxi to get here from Riverside Drive and 116th Street and realize I can either clean me or clean the apartment, but not both, which provokes a spate of agitated swearing. Not that my mother’s a neat freak, believe me—until Nonna came to live with us after my grandfather died when I was ten, I didn’t even know you could make a bed—but one look at this place, and she’s going to know I’m not exactly in control.

Not an option.

Naturally, every single muscle immediately seizes, a condition in which I might have remained indefinitely had not the doorbell rung. I let out a single, one-size-fits-all expletive and force myself to the door. Tell me Nedra got the one cabbie in all of Manhattan who actually knew where he was going.

I peer through the keyhole, practically letting out a whoop of joy. When I yank open the door, Verdi engulfs me from the open door across the hall as Alyssa, my neighbor Ted’s twelve-year-old daughter, grins up at me, all legs and braces and silky honey-colored hair and big green eyes. I am so grateful it’s not my mother that I don’t even care about my fried poodle head or that the melted chocolate splotch on my jammies right between my booblets calls attention to the fact that I’m not wearing a bra. Not that Ted would care, although I’m not sure I’m setting a good example for Alyssa.

In spite of my panic, I grin back, although I can feel it tremble around the edges. Alyssa’s my buddy; I’ve sat for her more times than I can count since Ted won custody of her four years ago, no mean feat for a gay man, even today. In the last year, she’s begun to notice boys, which I gather is about the same time her father did. But you know how it is, always easier to talk to someone outside the family about these things….

I notice her hands are clamped around a plate of cookies. Oh, yeah—things are definitely looking up.

“We got concerned when we didn’t hear you leave the apartment,” her father now says, looming behind his daughter. I get a glimpse of a faded navy T stretched across a solid torso, and bare, hairy legs protruding from the bottoms of worn drawstring shorts—the freelance writer’s summer chained-to-the-computer ensemble. Underneath silver-splintered, dark brown hair as curly as mine, worry lurks in hazel eyes as he takes in my less-than-reputable appearance. “I hope you didn’t spend longer than ten minutes to get that look, honey, because, trust me, it isn’t you.”

My attention really, really wants to drift back to the cookies, but I suddenly remember the peril I’m in. “Oh, God. My mother’s on her way. In a taxi.”

Ted looks at me, glances over my shoulder into my apartment. I swear he blanches. He, too, has met my mother. “Got it. We’ll be right there.”

“Oh, no, you don’t have to—”

Ted throws me a glance that brooks no argument, then says, “Al, go back inside and get the box of trash bags. And grab Randall while you’re at it.”

Knowing the cavalry is coming shakes me from my stupor enough to send me back into my apartment, where I once again freak out. Where did all this crap come from? Do I really subscribe to this many magazines? Why do I have so many dishes? And where am I going to stash it all?

I grab the wedding dress, then stand there doing this bizarre, twitching dance with the thing—there’s no way this puppy is gonna fit in any of my closets and the only door behind which I could conceivably hide it leads to the bathroom. Where I need to be right now—

Randall, Ted’s lover, slips his bold, buff, black, bald self in through the open door, lets out a deep bark of laughter. He’s in High-Wasp casual mode—Dockers, blue Oxford, striped tie, penny loafers. And a diamond earring. “Lord, woman—you have a consolation orgy in here or what?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Ted and Alyssa return. To my immense relief, she still has the cookies, which she sets on the counter. A synapse or two misfires.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, no. I mean, I don’t know how it got this way. Are those for me?” I finish with a bright smile for Alyssa.

“Uh-huh,” the kid says. “Dad taught me how to make them this morning.” She peels back the Saran and carries the plate over to me. Randall pries the crushed dress from my hands before I salivate all over it. I take a cookie, watching him stride out the door. It is a bittersweet moment.

“The place got this way, honey,” Ted says, deftly picking up the thread of the conversation, “because you’re a pack rat living in a shoebox. Okay, Al,” he says to his daughter, attacking the corner where the desk used to be, “the object is not to clean, but to make it look clean.”

“You mean, like when Mom comes over?”

“You got it.”

I stand there munching as the child calmly opens a closet, begins shoving things inside like a pro, while her father straightens and stacks and fluffs. “You know,” he says, “a cousin of mine just got a three bedroom in Hoboken for probably half what you’re paying for this dump.”

That’s enough to make me stop chewing. “But it’s in Jersey.”

Ted considers this for a moment. “Good point.”

Randall returns, sans dress.

“What did you do with it?” I ask.

“Do you really care?”

“I—no, actually.”

It might be my imagination, but I think I see something akin to relief in his dark eyes. I don’t think either Ted or Randall cared much for Greg, although they never said anything. Then a grin stretches across Randall’s molasses-colored face, popping out a set of truly adorable dimples, before he says something about hiding a wedding dress being a damn sight easier than hiding Ted when Randall’s mother pops in for a visit. So I grab another cookie, since they’re sitting right there on the coffee table, and start in about how, since Randall’s well into his thirties and not married, his parents might have a few suspicions, when Ted straightens and says, “Hello, Miss Chatterbox? I’m busting my butt here while you’re standing here dispensing advice about honesty issues?”

When I jump and head toward the kitchen, he snags me with one long arm, whipping me around and flinging me toward the bathroom door. “We do this. You do you. And burn that…thing you’re wearing.”

Seconds later I step into the shower and imagine I hear Shelby’s perky little voice saying, “Now, think positive, honey. Things really will turn out for the best,” followed immediately by Terrie’s, “You don’t need that sorry piece of dog doo in your life, girl, and you know it.” And between that and the sugar high, I think, You know, they’re right. I have terrific friends and hot water when I actually need it and a new client to see on Monday and a brand-new bottle of shampoo to try out and my period isn’t due for two more weeks. So I was supposed to be on my honeymoon right now. So my heart is broken. I will heal, life will go on, because I am woman and I am invincible and no man is gonna get me down when I live in a city where I can get Kung-Pao chicken delivered to my door twenty-four/seven.

Now if I could just convince this permanent lump in the center of my chest to go away, I’d be cookin’ with gas.

When I emerge, ten minutes and one hairless body later—my mother equates shaving with kowtowing to male standards of beauty; my take on it is I prefer not to look as though I’ve missed several rungs on the evolutionary ladder—my apartment once again looks like someone reasonably civilized lives here and Ted and Randall and Alyssa are nowhere in sight. The Blockbuster box, however, is. Which means, yes, the movie’s now so late, I’m surprised they haven’t sent their goons after me. On that cheery note, I grab another cookie (huh—looks like they took a few back with them) and I think how much I love this silly little place, with its Barbie kitchen and high ceiling and two big windows looking east across Second Avenue to the apartment directly across from mine.

Five years ago, I sublet it from a costume designer named Annie Murphy for six months while she went out to L.A. to do a movie. Only, she kept getting work out there and never came back. And over the years, her sister from Hoboken would come to cart off Annie’s furniture—with Annie’s blessings—and I’d replace it. The place was truly mine now, in every sense but the lease.

But I would have been happy in suburbia, too. I was going to get a dog. A big dog. Something that slobbered.

Oh, well.

Anyway, while I’m musing about all this, my mouth clamped around half a cookie, I make myself open one of the bags I’d packed for the honeymoon, where whatever clothes I do have reside. All sorts of slippery, shiny, weightless things—some new, some old favorites—wink at me when I flip back the top. I spend my working day in simple, neutral outfits: black, beige, gray, cream. Nothing that would distract my clients—I want them to see my designs, not the designer. On my off hours, I go wild. Salsa colors. Bold prints. Stuff that makes me happy.

Licking crumbs from my lips and telling myself I do not need another cookie, especially on top of the Häagen-Dazs bar, I slip into a pair of brand-new, fire-engine-red bikinis and matching lace bra that are more concept than substance, a short purple skirt, a silk turquoise tank top. I may have pitiful tits but my legs are good, if I do say so myself, especially in this pair of gold leather-and-acrylic mules that make me nearly six feet tall. On my Favorite Things list, shoes rank right behind food and sex. Although sometimes, on days like today, sex gets bumped to third. I turn, admiring my feet. God, these are so hot.

A pair of combs to hold back my hair, a spritz of perfume, a slick of lip gloss—

I look at my reflection and think, God, Greg. Look what you’re missing. Then the intercom buzzes.

And I just think, God.

Three

The tile floor in the bathroom in my first apartment, a fifth-floor walkup way downtown off First Avenue, was so caked with crud that everyday cleaning agents were worthless. So one day I hauled my butt to the little hardware store around the corner and explained my plight to the stumpy old man on the other side of the counter who’d probably been there since LaGuardia’s heyday. From behind smudged bifocals, he seemed to carefully consider me for a moment, nodded, then vanished into the bowels of the incredibly crammed store. A moment later he returned bearing a jug of something that he reverently placed on the counter, still eyeing me cautiously, as if we were about to conduct our first drug deal together.

“This’ll cut through anythin’, guaranteed,” he said.

Muriatic Acid the label proclaimed in ominous black letters. The skull and crossbones was a nice touch, too.

“Just be sure to keep windows open,” Stumpy said, “wear two pairs of gloves, and try not to breathe in the fumes, cause’, y’know, it’s poison an’ all.”

Undaunted, I trekked back to my hovel, suited up, pried open the bathroom window with a crowbar I bought at the same time as the acid, and poured about a tablespoon’s worth of the acid on a really bad spot by the bathtub. The sizzling was so violent I fully expected to see a horde of tiny devils rise up from the mist. For a moment, I panicked, wondering if the acid would stop at devouring roughly a century’s worth of dirt and grime, but would also take out the tiles, subflooring, and plasterboard of my downstairs neighbor’s ceiling, as well. After a few mildly harrowing seconds, however, the fizzing and foaming stopped, and I was left with what had to be the cleanest three square inches of tile in all of lower Manhattan.

And that, boys and girls, pretty much describes what happens when my mother and I get together.

The instant Nedra enters my space, or I hers, I can feel whatever self-confidence and independence I’d managed to accrue over the past decade fizz away, leaving me feeling, temporarily at least, tender and raw and exposed. Which is why I avoid the woman. Hey, I’m not into bikini waxes, either.

It’s not that she means to be critical, or at least not with malicious intent. It’s just that, unlike the vast majority of her peers, Nedra hasn’t yet lost her sixties idealistic fervor. If anything, age—and a few years as a poli-sci prof at Columbia—has only fine-honed it. I, on the other hand, am a definite product of the Me generation. I like making money, I like spending it, preferably on great-looking clothes, theater tickets and trendy restaurants. The way I figure it, I’m doing my part to keep the economy from collapsing. Not to mention supporting entrepreneurship and the arts. Nedra, however, cannot for the life of her understand how her womb spawned such a feckless child. Nor has she yet been able to accept the hopelessness of converting me.

The good news is that the stinging usually doesn’t last for long. Underneath the insecurities, I’m not the piece of fluff I appear. I can survive a Nedra attack, much as I’d probably survive a tornado. And while that doesn’t mean I have the slightest desire to move to Kansas, I have also learned how to play the game.

Take now, for instance. I open my door, glower at her. Take the offensive for the few seconds she’ll let me have it. After all, she doesn’t know I’ve been tipped off.

“Nedra! What the hell are you doing here?”

“Oh, would you just get over it and let me be a mother, already?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

She barges in, a grocery bag banging against her leg.

“I thought I told you I didn’t want company?”

“You’re distraught,” she says. “You have no idea what you want. Or need. And right now, you need a mother’s support.”

Except then she scans my outfit, disapproval radiating from her expression. Not because of the way I’m dressed, but because she knows I spent big bucks on it. She, on the other hand, is in full aging-hippie regalia—print broomstick skirt, white T-shirt underneath a loose embroidered blouse (no bra), Dr. Scholl’s wooden sandals.

I cross my arms. Glower some more. “Don’t worry. They’re all made in America.” Never mind that my avowal is full of bunk, and we both know it—the shoes, especially, positively scream Italian—but even at her lowest, Nedra isn’t likely to yank out a tag and check. Instead, she gives in to five thousand years of genetic conditioning and goes all Jewish Mother Affronted on me.

“Did I say anything?”

“You didn’t have to. And how old is that skirt, anyway?”

She waves away my objection and clomps toward my kitchen, and I once again—much to my chagrin—stand in awe of my mother’s commanding presence.

On a good day Nedra reminds me a lot of Anne Bancroft. Today, however, the effect is more that of a drag queen doing an impression of Anne Bancroft. Rivers of gray surge through her dark, shoulder-length hair, as thick and unruly as mine. The bones in her face jut; her brows are dark slashes over heavy-lidded, nearly black eyes; her mouth, never enhanced with lipstick, is full, the lips sharply defined. Although she has never smoked—at least not cigarettes, and never in my presence—her voice is low and roughened from one too many demonstrations; her boobs sag and sway over a rounded stomach and broad hips; her hands are large and strong, the nails blunt.

And yet there is no denying how magnetically attractive she is. She moves with the confidence of a woman totally comfortable with her body, her womanhood. All my life, I have noticed the way men become mesmerized in her presence. Struck dumb, many of them, I’m sure, but I early on learned to recognize the haze of respectful lust. Not that I’ve ever been the recipient of such a thing—not in that combination, at least. A shame, almost, that she’s refused to date since my father died. She insists love and marriage and men are part of her history; now she’s free to devote her life to her work, her causes, and, when I don’t duck quickly enough, to me. Yes, she is a formidable woman, someone you instinctively want on your side—or as far away from your side as possible—but her sexuality is so potent, so uncontrived and primal, she could easily serve as a model for some pagan fertility goddess.

The clothing disagreement has been laid to rest for the moment in favor of—I see her scan the apartment—reviving the Living Space Dispute.

My fists clench.

“I still don’t see,” she says, plunking down the grocery bag filled with something intriguingly solid onto my counter, “why you feel you have to line a greedy land-lord’s pockets for a space this small. Honestly, honey—you could drown in your own sneeze in here.”

“The place is rent-stabilized,” I say. “Which you know. And it’s mine.” Well, for all intents and purposes. “And it’s a damn good thing I didn’t let it go, considering…things.” I clear my throat. “What’s in the bag?”

“Ravioli. Nonna made it this morning. And you could live with Nonna and me, you know. Especially now that I’ve moved all my stuff up front to the dining room, since we don’t really need it anymore, so there’s an extra room besides the third bedroom, you could use it for an office or studio or something. I mean, c’mon, think about it—even if you split the rent with me, think how much money you’d save, and have twice the space besides.”

Twice the space, but half the sanity. I cross to the kitchen, remove the plastic container from the bag. “Right. You wanna take bets on who would kill whom first? Besides, you actually expect me to believe those rooms are vacant?”

My childhood memories are littered with images of tripping over the constant stream of strays my parents took in, friends of friends of friends who needed someplace to crash until they found a place of their own, or the grant money came through, or whatever the excuse du jour was for their vagrancy. I never got used to it. In fact, every time I got up in the middle of the night and ran into a stranger on my way to the bathroom, I felt even more violated, more ticked, that my space had been invaded. Which is why, I suppose, despite the pain of paying rent on my own, I’ve never been able to stomach the idea of a roommate. Not one I wasn’t sleeping with, at least.

And Nedra is well aware of my feelings on the subject, that much more than the normal grown child’s need for independence propelled me from her seven-room, rent-controlled nest. Unfortunately, what I call self-preservation, she has always perceived as selfishness.

“I don’t do that anymore,” she says quietly. “Not as much, anyway.” I snort, shaking my head. “Look, I’m not going to turn away someone who genuinely needs my help,” she says, almost angrily. “And, anyway, Miss High and Mighty, since when is it a crime to help people out?”

I look at her, feeling old resentments claw to the surface. But I say nothing. I’m feeling fragile enough as it is; I have no desire to get into this with her right now. Which is, duh, why I didn’t want to be around her to begin with.

Then she sighs. “But I am more cautious than I used to be. I don’t take in total strangers the way Daddy and I used to. Not unless I have some way of checking them out.” She rams her hand through her hair, frowning. “It upsets your grandmother, for one thing.”

Well, good. At least her mother-in-law’s getting some consideration, even if her daughter didn’t. I notice, however, she doesn’t contradict me about the killing-each-other part of my observation.

I return my attention to the plastic container of pasta in my hands. Defying their imprisonment, the scents of garlic and tomato sauce drift up. Traditional, artery-clogging ravioli, stuffed with plain old meat sauce, the pasta made with actual eggs. My knees go weak. I put the container in my empty fridge, make a mental note to call Nonna when I get back to thank her—

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Nedra says softly. So softly, in fact, I look up in surprise.

“About?” I ask, since I don’t think we’re talking about the Hotel Petrocelli anymore.

“What do you think?”

Ah. I almost smile. “Oh, right. You hated Greg, you detest his family and everything they stand for. I somehow don’t think you’re real torn up that it didn’t work out.”

“Well, no, I’m not, I suppose. I couldn’t stand the thought of your marrying into that bunch of phonies.”

An exquisite pain darts through my left temple. “Just because they don’t live the way you do, don’t think the way you do, that doesn’t make them phonies.”

She gives me that okay-if-that’s-what-you-want-to-believe look, then says, “Whatever. But what I feel about them doesn’t matter. Not right now. I can still feel badly for you. I know you loved him.”

And I can tell it nearly kills her to admit that. But before I can say anything else, she goes on.

“And it kills me to know you’re hurting. I remember what it feels like, suddenly being single again. And it’s the pits.”

I’m staring at her, unblinking. Is this a “Twilight Zone” moment or what? Empathy? From Nedra? On a personal level?

I think I feel dizzy.

“And I also know what it feels like,” she continues, her dark eyes riveted to mine, “the first time you go out into the world after something like this. That you look at everyone around you and wonder how they can just go on, living their normal lives, when your own has fallen apart.”

For the first time, I notice the dark circles under her eyes, that she looks tired. Worried, even.

I have seen my mother outraged, exhilarated, devastated. But not once that I can remember have I ever seen the look in her eyes I see now. And I realize she’s really not here to torture me, at least not intentionally, but because she needs me to need her. As a mother, as a friend, as anything I’ll let her be.

Oh, dear God. She wants to bond? To do the whole we-are-sisters-in-tribulation thing?

My eyes are stinging as I turn away to toss my sunglasses and a book into a straw tote. The criticism, the clashing of opinions…I know how to brace myself against those, how to grit my teeth against the sting. This…this compassion, this whatever it is…

I have no idea what to do with that.

“We better get going,” I say, snatching the stupid video off the coffee table before tramping through the door.

An hour and a half later things have returned to normal. Or what passes for normal between my mother and me. We got into a political fracas before I even hailed the taxi, an argument that wasn’t fully cold in its grave when we arrived at Grand Central and she launched into an unprovoked attack on several hapless passersby for ignoring a homeless man on the sidewalk, to whom she gave a ten dollar bill.

It was ever thus. I know my parents sure didn’t earn the big bucks as instructors at Columbia, especially not in those early years, but they were profoundly aware of those who had less, to the point where their socialistic consciousnesses weren’t at peace unless they’d given away so much of their earnings to this or that cause, we were barely better off than the poor wretches they supported. Generosity is all well and good—don’t look at me like that, I give to charity, jeez—but weeks of living off lentils and boxed macaroni and cheese night after night because we couldn’t afford anything else got old real fast.

I suppose they thought, or at least hoped, their altruistic example would instill a like-minded spirit of sacrifice for the common good in their daughter. Instead, a childhood of forced culinary deprivation has only fostered an insatiable craving for prime rib and ridiculously expensive, ugly little fruits that are only in season like two days a year.

So. I pretended I’d never seen her before in my life as I sauntered into Grand Central as gracefully as one can with a trio of soft-sided canvas bags in assorted sizes hanging about one’s person. I was also profoundly grateful it was ninety degrees and therefore highly unlikely we’d pass somebody wearing a fur. Don’t even think about walking down Fifth Avenue with Nedra anytime between October and April. Dead things as fashion statement send her totally postal.

Which is why she must never know about the Blackglama jacket hanging in my closet, an indulgence I succumbed to, oh, four years ago, I think, when I got my First Big Client, a dot.com entrepreneur who basically waved a hand at the SoHo loft he was thrilled to have “only” paid a million five for and said, “Just do it.”

At least I’ve got a mink jacket to show for it. The client, sad to say, is probably lucky to still have his shirt.

But I digress. Once I got Nedra past all the potential land mines and onto the train, I realized having my mother with me did have certain advantages. For one thing, I couldn’t bicker with my mother and moon over Greg at the same time. For another, men were far less likely to hit on me with my mother gesticulating wildly beside me, which was a good thing because I was seriously uninterested in fending off the deluded. Although one or two intrepid souls tried to hit on her. For the most part, however, I could count on my fellow New Yorkers to stay true to type and basically ignore the dutiful daughter escorting the crazy woman back to Happy Acres after her little field trip to the city. And while I still cringed at the thought of Phyllis in the face of my mother’s Open Mouth Policy, at least there wouldn’t be any long stretches of awkward silence. Although there would undoubtedly be a legion of short ones.

Although, really, I have no idea what I’m so nervous about. Phyllis and I have always gotten on together just fine. And after all, I’m the dumpee. If anything, she should feel embarrassed about seeing me, not the other way around.

And while I’m mulling over all this, I notice my mother’s been oddly subdued for the past half hour or so. Of course, applying that word to Nedra is like saying the hurricane’s been downgraded to a tropical storm. But it’s true: she’s actually been reading quietly, the silence between us punctuated by nothing more than an occasional snort of indignation. I glance over from the racy novel I’m reading, something with heaving bosoms and flowing tresses adorning the cover. The heroine’s not too shabby, either.

“Whatcha reading?” I say, noting that the tome on my mother’s lap weighs considerably more than I do.

“Hmm?” She frowns at me over the tops of her reading glasses, then tilts the book so I can see the cover. Ah. Some feminista treatise on menopause, which is definitely the topic of the hour these days, since Nedra apparently stopped having periods about six months ago. When she passes the first year without, she says, she’s going to have a party to celebrate her official entrée into cronehood.

She refocuses on the book, the corners of her mouth turned down. “You have no idea,” she says in a voice that would carry, unmiked, to the back row of Yankee Stadium, “the insidious ways the medical establishment tries to foist off the idea that every natural function of the female body should be regarded as a disability. It’s absolutely outrageous.”

At least four passengers across the aisle give us disapproving looks. Except for one middle-age woman who nods.

I “hmm” in reply and look back at my book, suppressing a long-suffering sigh. The odd thing is, it’s not that I don’t agree with her about a lot of what she gets so fired up about—I’ll probably read that book myself—it’s just there are quieter, more dignified ways to make one’s point. After all these years, Nedra still has the power to embarrass the hell out of me. You would’ve thought I’d become inured to her outbursts by now. I haven’t.

Many’s the time as a child I was tempted to call Social Services, get a feel for what the adoption market was for skinny, Jewish-Italian mutt girl-children of above-average intelligence. Of course, I do understand that parents’ embarrassing their kids goes with the territory. But there are limits. Nedra, however, never seemed to learn what those were.

Since we’ve already discussed the fact that I’m not going to kill my mother, I do the next best thing: I pretend we’re not related.

When the train pulls into our station, my stomach lurches into my throat and stays there. I wrestle out from underneath my seat the three bags into which I intend to pack the essentials, although the plan is to ask Phyllis to stop by the local Mailboxes, Etc., on our way for some boxes so I can pack up and send the rest back to Manhattan via UPS. And yes, it would make more sense to simply rent a car and drive everything back. But neither Nedra nor I drive, since both of us were raised in Manhattan, where cars are a liability, not a convenience.

Of course, Greg insisted I’d have to learn how to drive once I moved out to the suburbs, and because I was blinded by love and basically not in possession of all my faculties, I plastered a game smile to my face and said, “Why, sure, honey.” He even tried to teach me. Once. Let’s just say, the roads are safer with me not on them. I do not, apparently, possess any natural aptitude for steering two tons of potentially lethal metal with any degree of precision.

We and the cases spill out onto the platform, where we both remark how nice it is to breathe without the sensation of trying to suck air through a soggy, moldy washcloth.

The train pulls away. We are conspicuously alone on the platform, with nothing but a soot-free breeze and bird-song to keep us company.

“You did tell her you were coming up on the 11:04?” my mother says.

I refuse to dignify that with an answer.

“Her hair appointment must have run over.”

“Don’t start,” I say on a long-suffering sigh, but she either doesn’t hear me or chooses not to respond. Instead she treads over to a bench, sinks down onto it, drags her book back out of her tote bag and calmly resumes her reading. Not ten seconds later, however, I nearly jump out of my skin at the sound of a male voice calling my name from the other end of the platform. I whip around, shielding my eyes from the glare of the sunlight bouncing off the tracks, nearly losing my cookies—literally—at the sight of the tall man in khaki shorts and a polo shirt loping down the platform toward us.

I swear under my breath, thinking it’s Greg, suddenly giving serious consideration to the idea of swooning onto the tracks in the path of an oncoming train. Except the next train isn’t due for at least an hour and as the man gets closer, I realize the man’s hair is too long and dark, his shoulders too broad, to be Greg. Instead, it’s Bill, his younger-by-ten-months brother.

Persona non grata in the Munson clan. In other words, a Democrat.

He is also apparently a leg man, given the way his gaze is slithering over the area south of my hemline.

When Greg and I were together, Bill simply never came up in the conversation. In fact, I nearly gagged on my white wine when, at our engagement party, Greg grudgingly produced this handsome, charming, six-foot-something sibling of whom I had no previous knowledge. He seemed like a nice enough guy to me, but Greg’s family acted as if the man ran drugs in his spare time.

If only.

From what I was able to glean from pumping Greg’s friends, seems Little Bill backed Big Bob’s opponent’s campaign in the last election.

Ouch.

However, now that I owe Greg basically no loyalty whatsoever, I decide to like his brother, just for spite. After all, I don’t even live in that congressional district—what the hell do I care who represents it? Besides, don’t look now, but my po’ little ol’ trounced Ego is just batting her eyes and sighing over the way the man’s grinning at me.

Not that I’m ever going to have anything to do with another man, ever again, you understand. A fact that Prudence and Sanity, in their prim little lace-collared dresses and white gloves, remind that hussy as they snatch her back from the brink of disaster, shrieking something about frying pans and fire and let’s not go there, dear.

Of course, even if they hadn’t stepped in, my mother did. I may have legs, but she has that whole Earth Mother/Goddess thing going on, and once Bill catches sight of her, I might as well go ahead and leap onto the tracks, nobody would miss me.

I watch her—or more important, I watch his reaction to her—and I think, Jeez-o-man…a body could get knocked down by the waves of sexual awareness pulsing from this man. Except then he turns back to me, and his smile widens, and the tide heads for my beach, and I think, whoa. Okay, so maybe Billy Boy is just one of those men who gets turned on by every stray X chromosome that crosses his path. Either that, or just when I finally give up trying to figure out what It is that provokes the kind of male response Nedra has effortlessly provoked her entire life, It lands in my lap.

Talk about your lousy timing.

“I happened to stop by the house today,” Bill was saying with a whiter-than-white smile aimed at first my mother and then me, “and Mother said Ginger was coming up to pack up some things from Greg’s?”

So Billy Boy talks to Mama, huh? Interesting.

“Yep. That’s the plan,” I say, firmly telling my hormones to stop whining. “So I need to stop by someplace to get some boxes….”

“Don’t worry about it.” He takes the bags from me. Winks. Starts walking away, which I presume is our cue to follow. Although the wink was kinda irritating, I can’t help but notice he has a cute tush. When I glance at my mother, I have a sneaking suspicion she’s thinking the same thing. Between my clacking mules and my mother’s clomping Dr. Scholl’s, we are making a helluva racket heading for the stairs, so much so I almost miss Bill’s saying over his shoulder, “We can load up everything in the Suburban, if you like, and I can drive you back to the city.”

There is a God.

Thanking my almost-brother-in-law profusely, we tromp down the stairs and over to the car, which is only marginally smaller than the QE II. Excited barking emanates from what I can just make out to be a hyperactive golden retriever in the back seat.

“Damn.” Bill frowns at my outfit. “I hope my bringing Mike isn’t a problem?”

I give a wan smile, shake my head, trying to dodge the effusive beast as he rockets out of the car when the door’s opened, frantic in his indecision who to kiss first. We settle in for the ride to the Munson home—Mother has luncheon prepared for us, Bill says—my mother and I briefly skirmishing over who would sit in front. She wins.

No matter. I’d much rather have the dog than the man, anyway. Mike plops his entire front half on my lap once we’ve scrambled in, happy as, well, a dog with a human to use as a cushion. I sigh.

We start off. As always, it takes my head a while to adjust to the disproportionate ratio of cement to trees out here. But then, wiping dog pant condensation off my arm, something occurs to me.

“Oh, God. Greg’s not there, is he?”

I see Bill shake his head, his nearly black waves long enough to actually graze his linebacker shoulders. I believe the appropriate adjective to describe him is studly. His cologne is a little too strong for my taste, his attitude a bit too self-assured. And overtly supporting the enemy camp is a little ballsy, even for me. But, hey, the man has a car and is willing to cart me and all my crap back to town. He could sprout fangs and fur at the full moon for all I care.

“All I know is he’s in seclusion for a couple weeks. Nobody knows where.” Gray eyes glance at me in the rearview mirror. “Tough break about the wedding,” he says, sounding sincere enough.

Bill had been invited—I insisted—but he hadn’t shown. For far more obvious reasons than his brother’s MIA number, I suppose. I shrug. “It happens.”

I see his grin in the mirror, one a lesser mortal might well fear. Did I mention that Billy here has been divorced? Twice?

“All for the best?” he says.

“You can say that again,” I think I hear my mother mutter as I, who have been around the block more times than I care to admit, say, “Ah.”

In the mirror, I see brows lift. “Ah?”

“You’re flirting.”

Bill laughs, uncontrite. It’s a pretty nice laugh, I have to admit. “And here I was doing my damnedest to sound sympathetic.”

Okay, so the guy may be cocky as all get-out, but his honesty is refreshing. Well, it is. And it’s not as if I don’t understand the compulsion to get one’s parents’ goats, even if his methods are a bit extreme. So little Miss Ego, who’s been sulking in a corner of my brain since being banished there by her well-meaning, but self-serving, step-sisters, looks up hopefully. Not that it will do her any good. I’ve got other fish to fry.

“So…you and your mother do communicate?”

Bill shrugs. “From time to time. One of those maternal things, I suppose. She can’t find it in her heart to write me off entirely. And my father simply pretends I don’t exist.”

“Can you blame him?” I say.

That gets a laugh. “No, I don’t suppose I can.”

Which somehow prompts a conversation between Bill and my mother I have no wish to participate in. So instead I find myself mulling over Bill’s news about Greg’s “hiding out.” What does this mean, exactly, especially in regard to all those invoices I’ve sent to his office? And don’t I sound crass and insensitive, thinking about money barely a week after having my heart ripped to shreds?

Thank God I’ve got a nice chunk of change coming in from last month’s billings. It won’t be enough to get me caught up, but at least I’ll be able to stay afloat.

I lapse into semi-morose silence while my mother and Bill keep chatting away about who looks good for the Dems in the next national election. Which leads to my pondering one of life’s great mysteries: Why, oh why, if God is so all-fired omnipotent, does He regularly bite the big one when it comes to sticking the right kids with the right parents?

The Munson manse is stately as hell. You know—gray stone, pristine-white trim, lots of windows, a few columns thrown in for good measure. Very traditional, very classy, probably built somewhere in the fifties. Bill pulls the Suburban just past the front entrance, parking it underneath a dignified maple hovering over the far end of the circular drive. Before either my mother or I can get it together, he’s out of the car and around to our sides, opening first my mother’s, then my door.

“I’ve got some errands to run,” he says as Mike bounds off my lap, leaving a shallow gouge in my right thigh in the process. Bill lunges for the excited dog, grabbing him by the collar and shoving him back in the car. “So I’ll pick you up to go to the other house say in—” he checks his watch “—an hour?”

My mother and I exchange a glance. “You’re not having lunch with us?”

He laughs. “Uh, no. Dad’s in the neighborhood today, doing his relating-to-the-constituency thing. I don’t dare hang around.”

He walks back around to the driver’s side, says “See ya,” and is gone.

“I told you this was a weird family,” my mother mutters as we tromp up to the front door.

I bite my tongue.

Concetta, the Munsons’ Salvadoran housekeeper, opens the door before we ring the bell, although Phyllis is right behind her, that smile as carefully applied as her twenty-dollar lipstick.

“Oooh, you’re just in time,” Phyllis says as the maid rustles out of sight. Her eyes dart to my mother, right behind me; if Nedra’s unexpected presence has thrown her, she doesn’t show it. Instead, she clasps my mother’s hand in both of hers, welcoming her, after which she flings out her arms and engulfs me in a perfumed hug, which I hesitantly return. She is nearly as tall as I am, but she feels frail somehow, more illusion than reality. Sensing my discomfort, Phyllis pulls back, her hands gently clamped on my arms, sympathy mixed with something else I can’t quite define swimming in her pale blue eyes. I tense, panicked she’s going to say something for which I’ll have no intelligent reply. I’m a little in awe of this woman, to tell you the truth, even though she’s never done a single thing to engender that reaction. Well, except be perfect. To my immense relief, all she does is smile more broadly, taking in my outfit.

“Don’t you look absolutely adorable!” she says, glancing at my mother as if expecting her to agree. Quickly surmising she’ll get little support from that quarter, she returns her gaze to me, shaking her head so that her perfectly cut, wheat-colored pageboy softly skims the shoulders of her light rose silk shell. “What I wouldn’t give to be young enough to get away with those colors! And those legs!” She laughs. “I had legs like that, about a million years ago!”

Underneath those white linen slacks, I imagine she still does. Faces may fall and bosoms may sag, but good legs go with you to the grave, Grandma Bernice, Nedra’s mother, used to say.

“But come on back,” Phyllis says with a light laugh. “Concetta has set lunch out on the patio, but it’s no trouble at all to add another place.”

As always, Phyllis Munson’s graciousness blows me away. Chattering about the weather or something, she leads us through the thickly carpeted, traditionally furnished Colonial Revival, one befitting a Westchester congressman and his lovely anorexic wife.

Although the decor is a little bland for my taste—the neutral palette seems almost afraid to offend—there’s something about this house that’s always put me at peace the moment I set foot inside. The orderly, predictable arrangement of the furniture; the way the lush pile carpeting feels underfoot; the almost churchlike hush that caresses us as we make our way through the house to the back. What it says is, sane people live here.

Which is not to say that the house doesn’t tell Designer Ginger things about the owners they’d probably just as well the world not know. While the blandness isn’t offensive, the paint-by-number decor doesn’t reveal a whole lot about the owners’ personalities, either. There are no antiques, no quirky family heirlooms, to break the monotony of the coordinating upholstery and draperies, the relentlessly matching reproduction furniture. Oh, the quality is as good as it gets for mass production—Henredon rather than Thomasville—but it is a bit like walking into a posh hotel suite. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. I’ve always fantasized about staying in the Plaza, too.

But there’s something more, something I discerned within minutes of my first visit, six or so months ago: that the house’s self-conscious perfection stems in large part from the Munsons’ eagerness to cover up that neither of them hail from either old money or prize stock.

Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to spot the newly, or at least recently, arrived. They’re the ones petrified of making a mistake, the ones who constantly ask me if I’m sure this fabric or that piece of furniture is “right,” far more concerned about what their guests will think than they are their own preferences. The moneyed, the monikered, don’t give a damn. And now, as Phyllis leads us out onto the patio, her back ramrod straight, her voice carefully modulated and devoid of even a trace of a New York accent, I realize that describes my ex-almost-mother-in-law, as well. As gracious and naturally friendly as she is, her fear of being exposed as a poseur—White Plains masquerading as Scarsdale—is almost palpable.

Her insecurities do not bother me. If anything, they make her more human. More accessible. In her place, I imagine I would feel much the same way. I mean, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, it’s Phyllis’s very insecurities about her background that brand the Munsons as phonies in my mother’s eyes.

Phyllis touches the uniformed maid lightly on the arm, whispers something to her. The woman nods, disappears through a second set of French doors leading, if I remember correctly, to the kitchen. The terrace is open-air, although deeply shaded at this time of day. I’ve never been out here before, I realize, I suppose because it was either nighttime or too cold, the other times I was here. Now I glance out across the “yard”: if there are other houses beyond the dense growth bordering the property on all three sides, they are undetectable. A pool, flanked by dozens of urns and pots overflowing with brilliantly colored annuals, shimmers below us. I somehow doubt it’s ever used.

Oh, yes, I’m well aware I’m having lunch in The Land of Make Believe. I don’t care. That doesn’t make it less peaceful, or tranquil. Besides, after two hours in my mother’s company, I’m desperate.

We sit. Concetta bustles about, setting the extra place, deftly serving the first course, fresh fruit segments in a serrated cantaloupe half, followed by deli sandwiches on fresh rye. Nothing fancy or pretentious. We make excruciatingly brittle small talk, for a while, until Phyllis unwittingly gives my mother the opening she’s been waiting for.

“It must be very comforting, Ginger, having your mother around at a time like this.”

I can sense my mother’s coiling for the attack, but unfortunately I can’t get hold of a rock quickly enough to stop her before she strikes. I try glaring, for all the good it does.

“And maybe,” Nedra says, “if you’d taught your son that social prominence is no excuse for cowardice, there wouldn’t be a ‘time like this.’”

“Nedra—”

“No, Ginger, it’s all right,” Phyllis says quietly, even though her face is now a good three shades darker than her blouse. Her left hand, braced on the table in front of me, is trembling slightly; I notice her diamond wedding set is askew, too large for her sticklike finger. I feel sorry for her—I’m at least used to my mother. She isn’t.

“Gregory has embarrassed all of us, Mrs. Petrocelli. I assure you, he wasn’t raised to be inconsiderate, or to act like a coward. The last thing I would do is insult your intelligence by trying to make excuses for him. Both his father and I are deeply ashamed of our son’s actions—” she looks at me, reaches for my hand “—and cannot begin to convey how badly we feel for your daughter. Both Bob and I truly love her, and are heartbroken at the idea of not having her as our daughter-in-law.”

Wow. I knew they liked me, but…

Wow.

My mother seems equally stunned. Which is a rare phenomenon, believe me. Although I’d like to think my glaring at her had something to do with it, as well. You know the look—if you ever want to see your grandchildren again, you will apologize? Okay, so there aren’t any grandchildren. Yet. But I believe in planning ahead.

Then I noticed something else in her expression, a slight pursing of the lips, the merest narrowing of the eyes. An expression that says, clear as day, “Bullshit.”

My face warms at the implications of that expression, even as anger incinerates the remains of sandwich and fruit in my stomach. What? I want to scream. You got a problem with believing that maybe, just maybe, they really do like me?

And while I’m sitting here, trying to get my breathing under control, I hear Nedra take a deep breath, then say, “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. After all, I don’t suppose it’s fair—” she looks pointedly at me “—to hold the parents accountable for their children’s irrational behavior.”

I tear off a bite of roast beef sandwich and masticate for all I’m worth. Hey—there was nothing irrational about agreeing to marrying Greg. I’ve had one irrational moment in my entire life, and that took place ten years ago, in a cluttered supply closet smelling of musty mops and Lysol and Aramis. I catch on quick, as they say, and that lapse of judgment has not been, nor will it be, repeated. Obviously, considering the events of recent days, I cannot always prevent my being made a fool of, but I can at least control my contribution to my own downfall.

In the meantime, Phyllis is waving away my mother’s half-assed apology with another smile and some murmured reassurances about her understanding. But the damage has been done. True, after this afternoon, I probably will never see Phyllis Munson again. But I wouldn’t have minded leaving things on at least something of an up note, for crying out loud. But noooo, my mother has to open her big mouth and screw everything up. As usual.

This is exactly what I was afraid would happen, because it always does. It simply never occurs to Nedra that she doesn’t have to voice every thought that goes tromping through her brain. I really don’t give a damn if she hates Greg’s guts—I’m not exactly in a forgiving mood myself—but why take it out on the man’s mother?

Not to mention her own daughter?

I’m so upset, I can barely get down more than ten or twelve bites of the chocolate mousse Concetta has brought out.

Suddenly I realize Phyllis is saying, her voice tinged with sadness, “You have a wonderful daughter, Mrs. Petrocelli, which I hope you realize,” and I nearly choke on what I now realize is the last spoonful of mousse.

Fortuitously, Concetta picks that moment to appear with the extremely welcome news that Bill is waiting for us out front. My mother and I both spring up from our chairs as if goosed, although for very different reasons, thanking our hostess for the lovely lunch as we angle ourselves in the direction of the doors.

“No, please,” Phyllis says, rising to her feet. She’s around the table in an instant, her hand grasping mine. “Would you mind,” she says with a fixed smile for my mother, “letting Bill show you around the house and grounds? And you can assure him his father won’t be here, that he called and said he wouldn’t be home before dinnertime.” Then the smile zings to me. “I’d like a minute alone with Ginger.”

Four

“And then what happened?”

It’s the next afternoon. Sunday. Terrie is looking at me with huge black eyes across Shelby’s Danish contemporary dining table in the three-bedroom West End Avenue apartment Shelby’s in-laws bought for some ridiculously low ground-floor price when the building went co-op in the early eighties, then “sold” to Shelby and Mark for an even more ridiculously low price when they decided life was better in Boca. My cousin, a pair of tortoiseshell barrettes holding back her perky little blond bob, sits on the other side of the table, a forkful of Nonna’s ravioli poised exactly halfway between her plate and her mouth. Her expression is equally poleaxed.

I’m still shaking from yesterday. After Bill dropped me and all my junk off about four, then took Nedra (note to self: research feasibility of having some old gnarled Italian female relative put evil eye on own mother) on to her place, I played about a million games of FreeCell on the laptop, went to bed, got up, played another million games of FreeCell, finally deciding this definitely called for an emergency Bitch Session.

Shelby, Terrie and I have been calling these with sporadic regularity for probably twenty years, or approximately for as long as we’ve known that meaning for the word. Bitch, not years. Rules are simple: anyone can call one at any time, no low-fat food items allowed, and whoever calls the session gets the floor first. In the past ten years, I think I’ve called maybe a half dozen, Shelby none, and Terrie approximately five hundred.

And yes, I know what I said, about preferring to handle crises from the comfort of solitude, but these are extenuating circumstances. First off, it’s a known fact that too much FreeCell causes brain rot. And second, these two women are like extensions of my psyche. They’d only nag the hell out of me until I spilled my guts anyway. A favor that, in the past, I have regularly returned.

It’s definitely weird, the way we’re so close, since we’re all so different. But we go way back—Shelby and I to birth, practically, since we’re first cousins and only three months apart in age, with Terrie joining us in kindergarten. I suppose we initially glommed onto Terrie because she’d regularly beat up the other kids who’d hassle Shelby—who was eminently hassleable in elementary school—thus taking the pressure off me to do something for which I have no natural proclivity, namely, shedding blood. Especially my own. As for why Terrie, with her sass and street smarts, hitched up to a pair of white wusses…well, that’s a no brainer. We kept her supplied in Twinkies and Cokes for at least six years.

In any case, even after we grew out of needing her protection—Shelby grew into a Cute Little Thing and wormed her way in with the popular crowd, while I went on to cultivate the fine art of the Cutting Remark—we remained friends. The kind of friends who can say anything to each other, and do, which means we regularly tick each other off but we always get over it. All through adolescence, Shelby and I looked to Terrie to pave the way for us, a role Terrie was more than willing to accept. Not to mention reporting back to the troops, who’d listen in silent, envious awe. Or disgust. (Took poor Shelby six months to recover after Terrie described, in minute detail, her first French kiss. Of course, we were only twelve: at that point, we couldn’t even imagine a boy’s lips touching ours, let alone his tongue. We got over it.) In any case…Terrie got her period first, got kissed first, got felt up first, got laid first, got married first, got divorced first. Twice. Shelby bested us both only in one category—getting pregnant. Other than death or an IRS audit, I don’t suppose there are many firsts left.

So these days we content ourselves with muddling through our lives, dealing with our womanhood and all the crap attendant thereto. Shelby, of course, has been the Resident Married Lady since she was twenty-five; I have, for lo these many years, borne the standard as the singleton; and Terrie has been the switch-hitter, considering herself an expert on both sides.

The Bitch Sessions, and a passion for all things edible, unite us. But these sessions serve more of a purpose than simply outlets for venting and binging, at least for me: I know I can count on Shelby to be sweet, on Terrie to be snide, thus giving me two views of any given situation I may not be able to see myself, even as I know they both only want the best for me, as I for them. Husbands, boyfriends, jobs, may come and go, but these are my friends forever.

Friends who, at the moment, are hanging breathlessly on my every word as I relate the conversation between Phyllis and myself. I’ve already dumped on them about my mother, Greg’s phone call, and Bill’s flirting—every Bitch Session needs a little comic relief—although I decided to forgo the Nick business for now. See, Nick was the main course at a particularly hot Bitchfest some ten years ago. Dragging his sorry butt into a conversation now would only raise too many eyebrows—not to mention rampant speculation—for my comfort.

Anyway. Terrie, sporting about a thousand sleek little braids that hit her just below the collarbone, is giving me her get-on-with-it look. Not one to be rushed, I drag over the cheesecake. It’s presliced. I pick up a slice as if it’s a piece of fruit and bite into it. Much as I adore Nonna’s ravioli, today I go straight for the hard stuff.

“So,” I finally say, “after my mother leaves with Concetta, Phyllis leads me into her study. So I figure my best bet is to apologize for my mother before Phyllis can say anything.”

Shelby pops the fork out of her rosebud mouth. “What’d she say?”

“Well, she laughed, which was the last thing I expected. Then she went on about it was just a motherhood thing, you know. Nedra protecting her pup. Then she says something about knowing all about women like Nedra.”

That got a grunt from Terrie, whose beaded braids were beginning to remind me of a Gypsy fortune-teller’s plastic bead curtain. But don’t you dare tell her I said that. “There are no women like your mother.”

“That’s what I would have said. But then she said…what was it? Oh, right—” I take another bite of cheesecake “—about how when she was in college, she had to deal with all these liberal, feminist types who were convinced she was whoring herself because she did beauty pageants….”

I fade out for a moment, chewing and thinking about Phyllis’s pale blue eyes as she spoke, like a pair of small, cautious creatures peering out from behind a thicket of heavily mascara’d lashes.

Oh, they made a lot of noise, and raised a lot of hell, all those women whose families could afford to pay for their education, about women’s rights and how people like me were setting the women’s movement back by at least three centuries. None of them ever bothered asking me what I really thought, or bothered to consider that perhaps there were worse things in the world than a woman using her looks to get ahead.

I’d caught a whiff of desperation then, which I’d never noticed before, in her voice, her expression, the way her makeup was a little too carefully applied….

Terrie smacks my arm, making me jump. “Hey. Back to earth.”

I blink, fill them in, at least about Phyllis’s comments. Terrie opens her mouth as if she has something to say, only to close it again. Frowning, Shelby reaches for the cheesecake while there’s still some left. As I repeat the conversation as best I can remember it, I realize rehashing it is stirring something inside me, way below the surface, too far down to identify.

“Then she said something about how we all make choices, and that it doesn’t really matter what they are, as long as we’re happy with them—”

“Well, I think that’s very true,” Shelby says.

“—that so many women today seem to forget, or perhaps they don’t want to acknowledge, that sometimes we have to take what seems to be a step or two back in order to get enough momentum to propel ourselves through the barriers men have been erecting in front of them since time began.”

“Huh.” Terrie grabs her own piece of cheesecake, opting as well for the direct-from-box-to-mouth approach. “Spoken like a white woman who had choices.”

“Not as many as you might think,” I say. “She didn’t come from money, remember. Which is why she got into the beauty pageant stuff to begin with. But, anyway, that’s just a sidetrack issue, because then she says, out of nowhere, that she just wanted me to know Greg didn’t back out because of anybody else.”

Two sets of eyebrows dip simultaneously.

“I know,” I say. “So of course the minute she says that, I’m like, oh, crap—is she covering up something?”

But Shelby shakes her head. “No,” she says, then swallows. “I don’t think that’s why he dumped you, either.”

Terrie and I just look at her. Shelby continues eating, oblivious.

Then Terrie squints at me. “But you are ready to rip his entrails out, right?”

Shelby glances up for this. I sigh. “I don’t know. I should be. I mean, I am, but…” I look from one to the other. “I think mostly I’m just confused. And hurt.”

Terrie humphs. Shelby nods, even though I can tell the whole thing’s going over her head. She clearly can’t imagine her and Mark ever going through anything like this.

“So,” Terrie says. “She know where the jerk is?”

“No. Or so she swears. But then…she said I should forgive him, give him a second chance.”

“Like hell,” Terrie says. “Besides, it’s kinda hard to forgive somebody whose sorry ass isn’t around for you to forgive.”

I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. I feel Shelby’s hand light on my wrist. A light breeze from the air conditioner stirs her hair. “You still love him, don’t you?” she asks, a note of hope hovering in her wispy voice. Shelby cannot stand an unhappy ending. I don’t think she’s ever quite forgiven Shakespeare for Romeo and Juliet.

“The man stood her up,” Terrie interjects. “What do you think?”

“What’s that got to do with how she feels?” My cousin may be the most gentle soul in the world, but that doesn’t mean she can’t stick up for her convictions. And right now, she’s glaring at Terrie like a Yorkie whose chew toy is being threatened. “I mean, Mark once forgot my birthday, and I was so hurt I could have spit. But that didn’t mean I didn’t still love him, did it?”

I can tell Terrie is fighting the urge to bang her head on the table. Shelby is no dummy, believe me—she’d been a crack editor for a major magazine prior to her deciding to stay home with her first baby—but her eternally optimistic nature has definitely corroded her brain when it comes to matters of the heart.

In any case, I wrest back the conversation, since I called the meeting. “Anyway, what I said was, I didn’t know what I was feeling.”

They’re both frowning at me again.

Exasperated, I throw both hands into the air. “Whaddya want me to say? Okay, no, it’s not like I expect this to get patched up—sorry, Shel—but I’m not like you, either, Terrie. I haven’t had the practice you’ve had at getting over men.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Okay, so that didn’t exactly come out right, but you know what I mean.” I reach for the cheesecake; Terrie slaps my hand. So I guess I’m stuck with the ravioli. I get up to stick the plastic tub in Shelby’s microwave. “In any case, while a good part of me says I should write him off, there’s another part of me that isn’t sure. I mean, if he should come back.”

Terrie is clearly appalled. “You have got to be kidding. You’d crawl back to the skunk?”

“Did I say that?” The microwave beeps at me; I take out the ravioli, sink back into the chair at the table with a disgusted sigh, although I’m not sure what I’m disgusted at. Or with. Or about. My own ambivalence, maybe. Or that Greg’s actions have put me into this untenable position. “Of course I’m not about to crawl back to him.” I look up, fighting the tears prickling my eyelids. “He humiliated me. If, by some chance, he wants me back, he’d have some major groveling to do. But…”

“Oh, Lord. Here we go.” Terrie lets out an annoyed sigh. Shelby shushes her.

“But what, honey?”

“You weren’t there,” I say. “You didn’t see Phyllis’s face when she told me that I was the best thing that ever happened to Greg. That I would have been more of an asset to him than he could possibly have understood. That…” I take a deep breath, setting up the punch line. “That women are always the ones who have to fix things, that pride is a commodity we can’t afford.”

“That’s true,” I hear Shelby whisper beside me, although Terrie lets out an outraged, “Oh, give me a freaking break.” Her eyes are flashing now, boy, as she leans across the table and buries herself in my gaze.

“Girl, men have been able to get away with the crap they have for thousands of years because women like Phyllis Munson feel they have some sort of duty to perpetuate that myth. God—it makes me so mad, I could spit.” At this, she gets up, grabs her handbag from the buffet along one wall, rummaging inside it without thinking for the cigarettes that aren’t there, since she quit smoking a year ago. So she slams the bag back down onto the buffet and turns back to me, one hand parked on her hip.

“What that man did to you isn’t forgivable. Or fixable. I mean, come on—he calls you up and apologizes on the phone?”

Shelby actually laughs. Terrie and I both turn to her. “Well, of course he did,” she says. “He’s a man.”

“No kind of man I’d want hanging around me, that’s for damn sure. Besides, none of us is ever gonna break these chains of male domination and oppression if we don’t change the way we think about who’s gotta do what—”

“Oh, get off your high horse, Terrie,” Shelby says, a neat little crease between her brows. “Women are the peacemakers, honey. We always have been. That’s a sociological, not to mention biological, fact.”

“And I suppose you think that means we have to kowtow to them on every single issue?”

“No, of course not. But what good does it do for us to back them into a corner, either?”

“Making them accountable isn’t backing them into a corner.”

Shelby goes very still, then says quietly, “Says the woman who’s had two marriages crumble out from under her.”

Uh-oh.

I stand up, my hands raised. “Hey, guys? This is supposed to be all about me, you know—”

“Shut up, Ginger,” they both say, then Terrie says to Shelby, “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Twin dots of color stain my cousin’s cheeks, but I can tell she’s not going to back down. “That I’ve watched you with your boyfriends, your husbands, how every relationship you’ve ever had has degenerated into a mental wrestling match. How your obsession with never letting a man…control you, or whatever it is you’re so afraid a man’s going to do to you, has always been more important to you than the relationship itself. No wonder you can’t keep a man, Terrie—you castrate every male who comes close.”

Terrie actually flinches, as if she’s been slapped. A second later, though, she comes back with, “You are so full of it.”

“Am I?” is Shelby’s calm reply. “Then how come I’m the only one in the room who knows who she’s going to bed with tonight?”

Holy jeez.

Terrie glares at my cousin for several seconds, then snatches her purse off the chair and heads for the door, throwing “If you need to talk, Ginge, call me” over her shoulder before she yanks open the front door, slams it shut behind her.

For a full minute after her exit, the room reverberates with her anger. I’m not exactly thrilled to still be there, either, to tell you the truth, but I can’t quite figure out what to do. Let alone what to say.

Shelby gets up, starts clearing the table, her mouth turned way down at the corners. “I guess things got a little out of hand.”

I lick my lips, get to my feet to help her clean. “I thought the point of these was to get mad at other people. Not each other.”

On a sigh, Shelby carts stuff into the kitchen. “I know. But honestly, Ginge…Terrie’s attitude toward men sucks. And don’t give me that face, you know I’m right.”

I grunt.

Shelby turns on the water, starts to rinse off our few dishes prior to sticking them into the dishwasher. This kitchen does not look like a typical prewar Manhattan kitchen. This kitchen, with its granite countertops and aluminum-faced appliances, looks positively futuristic. I half expect Rosie, the robot from The Jetsons, to come scooting in at any moment.

I cross my arms, lean back against the countertop. “She’s entitled to her opinion, honey.”

“And if that opinion made her happy,” Shelby replies, “I wouldn’t say a word.” She slams shut the dishwasher, looks at me. “But she’s not. She wants the world to mold to her view of the way things should be, and since that’s not going to happen, she’s turning more bitter and cynical by the day.”

I humph. “Terrie was born cynical.”

A bit of a smile flits across Shelby’s mouth. “But not bitter.” Then she reaches over, grabs my hand. “The thing is, Greg’s mother is right. We are the ones who have to fix things. Forgiveness doesn’t make us weak, no matter what Terrie thinks. If anything, it only proves we’re the stronger sex.” Then the smile broadens. “Besides, if men were left to their own devices, we’d all be extinct by now.” She reaches up, brushes my hair back from my face. “You just have to ask yourself if you’d be happier with Greg, or without him.”

I knuckle the space between my brows, then sigh. “Well, I sure don’t like the way I’m feeling right now. As if somebody ripped off a major appendage.”

“Then maybe you should work with that.”

“So you’re saying you think I should give Greg a second chance, should the opportunity present itself?”

“I’m saying, just because a man is clueless, that doesn’t mean he’s hopeless. Here—” She hands me the ravioli container, now sparkling clean. “Don’t forget this.”

I take it from her, managing a wan smile.

The instant I step outside, the heat crushes me like groupies a rock star. Taking the smallest breaths possible so my lungs don’t incinerate, I troop toward 96th Street and the crosstown bus. After that little scene in Shelby’s apartment, I’m more confused than ever. But I refuse to believe my world is falling apart, despite the evidence to the contrary.

Who am I kidding? That was totally weird. Not to mention downright scary. Oh, sure, we’ve had about a million squabbles over the years, but nothing like that. And you know what? It ticks me off, in a way. I’m supposed to be able to count on Terrie and Shelby to restore my equilibrium when things get a little strange, as they count on me. They’re supposed to help me see things more clearly, not scramble my brains.

Well, forget it. Just forget it. I simply cannot wrap my head around this, not today. I am too hot and enmeshed in my own tribulations to care. Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll work up to trying to figure out how to smooth things over between them, but not now.

Now, I just want to go home, maybe have a good cry, finish the book I’m reading, even though it’s a romance which means it ends happily ever after, which is just going to depress the life out of me. It’s hotter than hell in my apartment, but I can strip to my panties if I want to, which, at the moment, is eminently appealing.

I turn east on 96th Street, trek up the hill toward Broadway. A hot breeze off the river slaps me in the back like a nasty little kid pushing me in line. I pass several people lurching downhill toward Riverside Park: a young couple with a toddler in a stroller, a pair of joggers, a middle-aged man with a Russell terrier. Well-dressed, affluent, secure. A far cry from the people who used to inhabit most of these buildings when I was a kid, until gentrification in the early eighties purged the legion of seedy SRO—single room occupancy—hotels on the Upper West Side of their decidedly unaffluent inhabitants.

As I pass the recently sandblasted buildings with their newly installed glass doors, their fatherly doormen, I remember my parents’ horror as, one by one, the helpless, hopeless occupants of these buildings were simply turned out onto the streets like thousands of roaches after extermination. Joining the already burgeoning ranks of the homeless, many of them were left with no recourse but to panhandle from the very people who now lived in what had once been their homes.

Over the past decade, the homeless aren’t in as much evidence as they were. I’m not sure where most of them went, since God knows there are even less places in Manhattan for the poor to live than there ever were. Even apartments in so-called “dangerous” neighborhoods now command rents far out of the reach of the middle class, let alone those struggling by on poverty level wages. But the dedicated homeless are still around, a life-form unto themselves, with their encrusted, shredded clothing and shopping carts and bags piled with whatever they can glean from garbage cans and Dumpsters, hauling their meager possessions about with them like a turtle its shell.

And yes, they make me uncomfortable, as they do most New Yorkers fortunate enough to not count themselves among their number, mainly because I’m not sure how to react to their plight. I’m as guilty as anyone of ignoring them, of looking the other way, as if, if I don’t see them, their problem isn’t real. At least, not real to me.

I know the vast majority of these poeple are not responsible for their present condition. Who the hell would choose to live on the street, after all? Many are mentally ill, incapable of achieving any success in a city in which that concept is measured in terms most of them couldn’t even begin to comprehend, let alone aspire to. Others have been beaten down so often, and so far, over so many years, that I doubt they have the slightest notion of how to even begin digging themselves out. So I do feel compassion. Just not enough to override my inertia. Or my guilt.

I used to think winter was the worst time to be without someplace to go. The wind that whips crosstown between the rivers can be brutal, icing a person’s veins instantly. But today, as heat pulses off the cement, as the humidity threatens to suffocate me, I’m not sure summer is much better.

And I suppose I’m thinking about all this because, as I’m standing under the Plexiglas shelter at 96th and Broadway, in a clump of six or seven other people waiting for the bus, one of these men approaches us. I watch as, as discreetly as possible, everyone else casually removes themselves from his path, turning from him, deep in their cell phone conversations, their newspaper articles, their own clean, neat lives.

The urge to follow their lead is so strong I nearly scream with it, even as I’m disgusted at my own reaction. But the man reeks, making it nearly impossible for me not to recoil. As I have most of my life, I wear my shoulder bag with the strap angling my chest to deter would-be purse-snatchers; however, my hand instinctively clutches the strap, hugging the bag to me.

Mine, the gesture says, and I am sorry for it.

I am now the only person still under the shelter, although dozens of people swarm the intersection like lethargic ants. The other bus waiters, undoubtedly relieved that I’ve been singled out and they can breathe more easily—literally—hug the curb and storefronts a few feet away, still close enough to easily catch the bus when it comes.

The man creeps closer, forcing me to look at him. He is filthy and unshaven, his posture stooped. Nearly black toes peer out from rips in athletic shoes only a shade lighter, a good two sizes too large. I cannot tell his age, but behind his moth-eaten beard, I can see how thin he is.

He holds out his hand. It is shaking. From the heat, hunger, the DT’s…? I have no way of knowing. I do, however, feel his embarrassment.

Nedra would have emptied her wallet into that hand, I know that, without a moment’s hesitation. But then, my mother’s crazy.

I glance away, my mouth dry, then back.

“Are you hungry?” I ask, the words scraping my throat. I notice a well-dressed Asian woman a few feet away turn slightly in our direction. But I only half see her frown, her head shake, because my gaze is hooked in the gray one in front of me, buried under folds of eyelids. Hope blooms in those eyes, along with a smile. He nods.

The rational part of me thinks, I should take him to a cheap restaurant, feed him myself. If I just give him money, what will he spend it on?

And then I think, who am I to judge?

But before I can make up my mind, a cop comes along and hustles the protesting man away, at the same time my bus squeals up to the stop. I board, behind the disapproving Asian lady, who asks me, as we take seats across the aisle from each other, if I was afraid. I say no.

The bus is air-conditioned and nearly empty, and I feel some of the tension that’s wormed its way into my head over the past few days slink away. We pull away from the stop; outside the man shuffles off toward Amsterdam Avenue, and my insides cramp.

As unsettled as I feel, as unhappy as I am, I still have a job. I still have a home. I still have my friends and my shoe collection and even, I have to acknowledge, my family. Life might be a little bizarre at the moment, but it’s far from horrible.

I pull out my novel, try to reimmerse myself in Gunther and Abigayle’s trials and tribulations, which has the unfortunate effect of only yanking my thoughts back to the men-and-women discussion of earlier. At the moment, I have to admit I’m inclined to side with Terrie on one thing: men are expendable. Their sperm might not be, but they are. I personally don’t need one to survive, or even flourish. I guess, if push came to shove, I could even go without sex. Nuns do. And it’s not as if I haven’t had my share of dry spells. And then there’s my mother, who’s gone without for, gee, how long is it now? Fifteen years?

I mean, really—are they worth the aggravation? Because, much as I’m inclined to agree with Terrie’s theory about how things should be between men and women, I think Shelby’s the realist. Oh, maybe there are true equalitarian male-female relationships out there, but by and large, women do have to defer to the men in their lives in order to keep harmony, don’t they? At the moment, I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, it just is. And right now, I don’t have the energy to be a feminist. I’m having enough trouble dealing with being a woman.

I give up on the book, stick it back in my purse. The Asian woman gets off at Central Park West; I settle in for the short ride through the Park, as I mentally settle in for the next phase of my life. Tomorrow, I go back to work. Tomorrow, I resume my normal, predictable, pre-Greg life. Selecting wall colors, I can handle. Sketching window treatments, I can handle. Charming the pants off a new client, I can handle. Granted, I’m not exactly eagerly anticipating the idea of facing Brice Fanning—my egomaniacal boss of the past seven years—and his inevitable snideties, but at least my work is one area of my life I can count on. I bring in a helluva lot of business, so we both know I’m not going to leave, and he’s not going to get rid of me. So. My plan is to reimmerse myself in my work, which, if not exactly exciting, is at least fulfilling and stimulating. Or at least it was.

And will be again, I vow as another layer of tension shucks off. After all, what’s the point of missing what I’ve never had, right? What do I know about being married anyway? Let alone about living in Westchester? I’m not only used to being single, I think I’m pretty damn good at it.

As of this moment (she says without the slightest shame whatsoever) I’m burrowing so far into my comfort zone, nothing on God’s earth is going to blast me out of it.

Not even the memory of a brief, hopeful smile beneath discouraged eyes.

Five

So here I am the next morning, clicking smartly down 78th Street in my tobacco-colored linen sheath (short enough to be chic but not slutty) and my new Anne Klein pumps, my fave Hermes scarf billowing softly in the breeze, when I notice a small herd of police cars clogging the street about a half block away. Which would, coincidentally, place them just outside the building where the offices for Fanning Interiors, Ltd., reside. It is not, however, until I notice the trembling band of yellow police tape stretched from one side of the entrance, around the No Parking sign out by the curb, on around the Clean Up After Your Dog sign, then back to the other side of the steps that I get that awful, knotty feeling in the pit of the my stomach that this does not bode well for my immediate future.

Still, I’m doing okay until I see the chalk outline on the sidewalk. Somebody screams—me, as it turns out—which garners the attention of at least three of the cops and one sanitation engineer across the street. Okay, so maybe my reaction is a bit over the top, but just because I live in Manhattan doesn’t mean I stumble across body outlines on anything resembling a regular basis. Besides, I haven’t had my latte yet. Not to mention that it’s barely eight-thirty and the temperature/humidity index is roughly equivalent to that on Mars. And I was already in a bad mood because my hair looks like Great-Aunt Teresa’s wig, which, trust me, is not a good thing.

“Jesus, Ginger,” I hear a foot away, which makes me scream again. I pivot, my purse smacking into some gawker who is dumb enough to come up behind a hysterical woman, to see Nick Wojowodski frowning at me. “What the hell are you doing here?”

His rough voice, the creases pinching his mouth, give me a pretty good idea he’s not having a wonderful morning, either. My shaking hand clamped around my still-lidded latte, I stare at him, but all I can think of is that outline. And the dark red stain I saw ooching out from it. I shudder, then say, “I work over there.”

“Oh,” he says, a world of meaning crammed into two letters. By now, onlookers are beginning to clot around us, including a couple of the other designers, the receptionist, the lady who does most of our window treatments.

“Would everybody who works here please go check in with Officer Ruiz?” Nick says, his baritone piercing the burr of voices beginning to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. I hear a gasp or two, but more out of surprise than actual shock. Or dismay. I don’t hear what Nick says next, or what anybody else says, either, because my stomach has just dropped into my crotch and I’m thinking that shape of the outline was suspiciously…familiar. Like it might have belonged to a shortish, balding gay man of about sixty or so who took great pleasure in regularly making my life a living hell. Next thing I know, Nick is hauling me off to one side, encouraging me to take a sip of the latte. I nearly gag on it, but I manage. It’s at this point that I notice the guy who owns the brownstone next door talking to one of the cops. He doesn’t look so good.

Nick follows my gaze, turns back to me. “You know that guy?”

“Nathan Caruso. Lives next door.”

“He positively ID’d the body,” Nick says softly. My eyes shoot to his, dread making my stomach burn.

“Who—?”

“Brice Fanning. Your boss, I take it?”

“Shit!”

Nick’s expression goes a little funny, which I guess isn’t too surprising, considering my reaction.

Oh, God. I am a horrible, horrible person. A man is dead, most likely not from natural causes, and all I can think is, “This is so freaking unfair!” Okay, so Brice was a mean, petty little man and I couldn’t stand being in the same room with him for more than five minutes—which made weekly meetings a bit problematic—but he was still a human being and thus deserves some respect, at least, if not an indication of sorrow.

I hold my breath for a second or two…nope, sorry, not gonna happen. Didn’t like the guy when he was alive, don’t much care that he’s dead.

If you want to leave now, I’ll completely understand.

But, God. Brice was Fanning Interiors. I was just a minion among many, one of the small army of designers Brice’s prestige and reputation were able to keep busy. I’d recently begun to get a serious leg up on establishing my own rep apart from Fanning’s, but there is not a doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t be living the lifestyle I was today had it not been for Brice’s taking me on seven years ago. In many ways, I was indebted to the man.

And now he’s nothing but a schmear on an East Side sidewalk. Oy. That poor guy who found him…

“How did he die?” I ask over the constant squawking of the police radio nearby.

Nick’s face undergoes this whole impersonal-police-mask thing, but his jaw is stubbled, as if he hasn’t had time to shave, and there are bags under his eyes. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

For some reason, this irks me. So I tuck one of the many curls that will spring forth like snakes from my French braid over the next fourteen hours and say, “I saw the blood, Nick. Somehow I doubt he was pecked to death by a rabid pigeon.”

Nick gives me this look. “Pigeons don’t carry rabies. And besides, you’re just assuming that was blood.”

I give him a look back. Then he sighs and says, “He was shot.”

I visibly shudder. I don’t much care for guns. Especially when they’ve been used on people I know. I take another sip of latte. “When?” I whisper.

“Real early this morning.”

I look up. “Any witnesses?”

“No.”

“The man was shot in the middle of 78th Street and there were no witnesses?”

“Another assumption. We found him in the middle of 78th Street. Doesn’t necessarily mean that’s where he was shot.”

“Oh,” I say, then frown in concentration, which earns me another heavy sigh.

My brows lift. “What?”

“Please don’t tell me you dream about being an amateur detective.”

“Not to worry,” I say. “I don’t even like to read murder mysteries.” He looks relieved, at least until I ask, “I don’t suppose you know who?”

Nick shakes his head, rubbing the back of his neck. “Nope. Which means we’ve got a lot of questioning to do. Starting with everybody who worked for him.”

“Today?”

“Yeah, today. What did you think?”

I shake my head. “Sorry, but I’ve got a ten o’clock, then appointments straight through the day—”

“Ginger,” Nick says, patiently. “Your boss is dead. Trust me, none of you are going to be doing any decorating—”

I bristle. “Designing.”

“—whatever, today…”

But before we can pursue this conversational track, another cop calls Nick over and I’m left entertaining a sickening sense of foreboding.

People are milling about, looking more put out than concerned. I let out a heavy sigh of my own, then take a tissue out of my purse, spread it on the step of the town house next door, and plunk down my linen-covered tush. Perspiration races down my back.

My poor little brain goes positively berserk. Dead people tend to do that to me. Especially dead people who had help getting that way, even if I couldn’t stand them. Brice Fanning might have been a brilliant designer, but he drove his employees nuts. I have never met anyone whinier, or pickier, or less inclined to give the people who worked for him the respect or recognition they deserved. The only reason most of us put up with him was for the money, as well as that reputation thing. But I think it’s safe to say once the shock wears off, he won’t be missed.

Except then, because my brain is already on overload and I tend to have an overly active imagination anyway, I think, gee, what if Brice didn’t bite the big one because somebody simply hated his guts? What if there’s some crazed person running around who has it in for interior designers? A client displeased with her faux painting job? A homophobe? An architect?

Or maybe his murder is even more random that that. Maybe somebody just did him in for his Rolex or something?

Carole Dennison, Brice’s top designer, joins me, although she doesn’t sit, out of deference to her vintage Chanel suit, I imagine. How can she not be dying in that jacket? She digs in her LV purse for a cigarette, lights up.

“Great way to start the week, huh?”

“Might rain later, though,” I say. “Maybe cool it off a little.”

She laughs, a raspy, braying sound that always makes me feel better. Carole has worked for Brice for about a hundred years, although, if the lighting is subdued and her makeup is thick, she only looks sixty. Ish. I like Carole a lot. She’s a tough, ballsy broad who doesn’t take anything off anyone, while instilling the unshakable conviction in her clients that nothing is impossible, given enough money. I started out at Fanning’s as her assistant, in fact, and learned more from her in one month than I’d learned in all my years of design school. We’re fairly close, enough that I’d even invited her to my wedding. So I’ve known for a long time that one of her major gripes was that, even though she brought in more business than any three of us put together, Brice refused to make her a partner. She’d also confided in me that she didn’t dare go out on her own, that Brice threatened to make her life a living hell if she did.

She crosses her arms, squints over at the herd of police cars. “If you ask me, I think it was that last lover of his.”

I’m not sure what to say to that, so I leave it at, “Oh?”

“Yeah. Bet you anything. Jealousy, pure and simple, since Brice took up with someone new about a month ago.” She looks at me. “Did you know?”

I shake my head. If I didn’t care about the man, I sure as hell wasn’t interested in his love life. Then, for a couple minutes, we make appropriate noises about how shocked we are, how stunned, how grossed out, both of us avoiding the one question hovering at the forefront of our thought:

What does this mean, job-wise?

Finally, because I can’t stand it anymore, I say, “So. Do you have any idea how the business is set up? I mean, in the eventuality of, um…” I gesture lamely toward the chalk mark.

Carol thoughtfully pulverizes the cigarette stub beneath her twenty-year-old black-and-beige Chanel slingback. To my shock, a tear streaks down her carefully foundationed cheek.

Uh-oh.

One acrylic nail—a subdued cinnamon color, square-tipped—flicks away the errant tear before it leaves a visible track in her foundation. She struggles for obvious control for a minute, then says, “Max told me—”

(Max Sheffield, Brice’s accountant. And I think Carole’s lover at one time, although I can’t confirm that.)

“—that he’d tried for years to get Brice to make provisions for the business to continue in the event of his death or incapacitation, especially after it took off the way it did in the late eighties. He suggested making the business a partnership with his senior designers, if not a corporation, or at least leaving it to someone in his will. A friend or family member, anybody.”

She lights up another cig and shakes her head, her Raquel Welch auburn hair shimmering in the hazy sunlight filtering through the buildings. “He refused. Said when he died, the business died with him.”

My immediate future flashes before my eyes, and it is bleak. “Which means?”

“Which means, as far as I understand it, we’ll all get whatever is currently due us and that’s it. Whatever’s left goes to pay outstanding bills, and if there’s anything left after that, the money goes to some obscure charity.”

My blood runs cold. “But what about our clients?”

Pale, glossed lips quirk up in a humorless smile. “They’re outta luck. And so are we, unless we all manage to find jobs with other firms.” She shrugs. “Get out your cell, honey, and start making calls.”

A great tiredness comes over me, followed almost immediately by a lightbulb flashing on in my head. “Hey—why don’t you start your own firm?”

Carole huffs out a stream of smoke that mercifully blows away from me. “Even ten years ago, I might have. But I’m going to be sixty-five in November. Way too old to start a business now. But why don’t you go into business on your own, designing accessories or something? The Jorgensons are still talking about that set of iron and marble tables you designed for them, Jesus—how long ago was that? Four years? You know your talent is wasted picking out wall colors.”

I smile wanly. “Hell, I haven’t designed anything in probably two years.”

“Well, you should.” She hisses out her smoke, tosses the second butt out past the curb. “You want to work for someone else the rest of your life?”

“Forget it, Carole. This gal doesn’t do Struggling Artist.”

“Chicken,” she says.

“But a chicken who eats.”

Of course, after today, that may not be true, which is why I suppose we both go silent for a little bit. Then Carole says quietly, “This hasn’t been a very good week for you.”

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