Blooming All Over Read Online Free PDF Page A

Julia had always done what she was supposed to do. She’dbeen the perfect daughter. Susie had been the lousy-math-student-and-who-gives-a-shit daughter. Adam, who took after their mother except that he had the nose he was born with instead of a surgically sculpted one like hers, was the son, in a class by himself.
    “You don’t look like barf,” Julia observed, “but you are a little pale. Are you okay?”
    “Other than starving to death, yeah.” To avoid Julia’s questioning gaze, Susie wandered around the room, tugging on a drawer handle, pulling back the window drape to check the view—a parking lot and beyond it a small strip mall with a Boston Market, a Pizza Hut and a Chinese restaurant called Wok’s Up, Doc? Food . Susie sighed deeply. A veritable banquet awaited her just across the parking lot. So near and yet so far.
    She felt Julia’s gaze on her for a moment longer. Then her sister turned back to the closet to hang up the dress she’d been holding. Susie had stuffed a few things into her suitcase, and they were probably so wrinkled that hanging them up now wouldn’t make any difference. “We’ve got two beds,” she remarked, waving at the pair of double beds, with their bolted-to-the-wall headboards and their cardboard-stiff green bedspreads. “I could sleep in one and you and Joffe could share the other. Or he could sleep in one and you and I could share.”
    “Grandma Ida would stroke out,” Julia said with a sigh.
    “There are worse things in the world,” Susie muttered, then shook her head, fending off a pang of guilt. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”
    “You just spent four hours in a van with her,” Juliasaid, her tone brimming with forgiveness. “You’re allowed to say terrible things.”
    Susie flopped down on one of the beds. The bedspread felt as rigid as it looked. “She spent the entire drive lecturing me on how she and Grandpa Isaac built Bloom’s from a sidewalk pushcart into the biggest deli in the world. Her words,” she added before Julia could correct her. “And her other topic was, ‘Susie, what are you doing with your life?”’
    Julia pulled a blouse from her suitcase and hung it next to her dress. How many outfits had she brought? This was a one-night trip, not a cruise on the QE II . “Did you tell her what you’re doing with your life?” she asked Susie, sounding just a bit too interested.
    “I told her I was living it, more or less. I didn’t go into details.” Susie watched her sister, hoping she wasn’t going to interrogate her the way Grandma Ida had. Not long after Julia had become president of Bloom’s, she’d informed Susie that Grandma Ida had told her she thought Julia was a lot like her. Julia had laughed when she’d shared this tidbit with Susie, as if the idea was preposterous. Susie hadn’t even smiled. She could see in Julia more Grandma Ida than Ben Bloom: the stubbornness, the focus, the determination. The vaguely judgmental curiosity that made her want to hear Susie’s answers to Grandma Ida’s nosy questions. Julia was taller than Grandma Ida, and her hair was black thanks to nature, not the ministrations of Bella, the colorist from hell. But yeah, Susie could picture Julia fifty-odd years from now, dressing in cardigan sweaters and frumpy skirts and comfortable shoes, her wrists circled with gold bangles and her mouth pinched as she scolded a wayward granddaughter forhaving crayoned a picture of purple bananas and orange grapes.
    One of Susie’s earliest memories of Grandma Ida was of her criticizing Susie’s drawing of a tree with blue leaves. To this day, she saw nothing wrong with that childhood picture, and everything wrong with her grandmother for having disparaged it.
    “So, what’s really bothering you?” Julia asked abruptly.
    Susie propped herself on her elbows. “Huh?”
    “Something is. I can tell.” Julia zipped her suitcase shut and placed it on the chrome rack next to the TV armoire.
    “My stomach,”