LITMIR.BIZ

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      “So you just…back down?”

      “I prefer to call it playing smart. However…” Her fingers brush the fabric, then shove it away, as though it’s toxic. “I may be second best, but I’m not stupid enough to pick something that’s gonna make my dress look like the knockoff—”

      Somehow, I manage to keep a straight face.

      “—so we start over.” Squinting, she crams the cigarette back in her mouth and says around it, gesturing toward the teetering piles on the long table over against the far wall, “Hand me the Volare book, wouldja? Let’s see what we can come up with.”

      I do, but as I root through the rubble, I have to ask, “But isn’t it a little late to switch fabric on the stores now?”

      “Like they care. You find it yet?”

      I have, miraculously enough. I hand it to Nikky, who thunks it onto a six-inch pile of jumbled papers. Where they’d come from, I have no idea, since I’d just straightened up yesterday. “So,” Nikky says, the cigarette dangling from her lips, pool-shark fashion, “We chuck the roses altogether and go with…” She flips through the book. “A plaid, maybe? Or something completely different, like…” With a grin, she turns the book around, yanking the cigarette out of her mouth with a flourish. “Hats. These are cute, right? Is there any green in it?”

      I shake my head. She grins.

      “Yeah, hats. It’s brilliant.” With a wink, she grabs her phone and punches a single digit. Ten seconds later she’s going, “Lenny! Nikky. How are you? Good, good… Listen. Here’s the deal. Forget the roses…yeah, yeah, I don’t like this sample you sent over, it’s very Target, you know what I mean? So instead, send me swatches of…” She randomly flips through the book, rattling off a dozen numbers. Then, as if she couldn’t be bothered, “And this cotton with the hats…number 2376, just for the hell of it. They all available? You’re sure? Great. And I can have the swatches tomorrow?” She gives me a thumbs-up. “You’re a doll, Len. Take it easy, now.”

      She hangs up, stubs out her cigarette, and smiles at me.

      “I don’t get it,” I say.

      A low laugh rumbles from her throat. “I know everybody thinks I’m a ditz. Including you, you’re just nicer about it than most. But let me tell you something…” Again, she leans forward, and I see in her eyes exactly why she is where she is. “People let their guard down if they think you’re stupid. Then they’re the ones who do the stupid stuff, you know what I mean? Lenny has no idea which of these I’m really interested in. And by the time I clue him in, it’ll be too late for anybody else to get one up on me again. And I think I like the hats better, anyway.”

      I think she’s kidding herself. But hey, not my business.

      “Anyway, so when the swatch comes, you’ll scan it and send it to the buyers, tell them the other fabric came in flawed and this is what we’re switching to, and that’ll be that—”

      Her eyes lift over my head, to her office doorway. The hair on the back of my arms bristles.

      “Problem solved?” Harold asks.

      “Yes, Harold,” she says, then adds, “By the way, Marilyn left a message on my voice mail, said seven was fine, she’d meet us at the restaurant.”

      “How’d she sound?”

      “Who can tell over voice mail?” Nikky says with a shrug. But her mouth thins in concern. “In a rush, though. As usual.”

      “She gets that from you, you know. Never knowing when to stop.”

      That’s okay, folks, don’t mind me.

      “Mar’s a big girl, Harold. She doesn’t need Daddy clucking over her like some Jewish mother.”

      “Yeah, well, maybe if the Jewish mother she’s got was doing her job, I wouldn’t have to,” he says, then walks away.

      I get up, making noises about getting back to my work so I can leave on time tonight—

      “He would die if I left him,” Nikky says softly.

      “Um…what?”

      “I know what you’re thinking. That you can’t understand why I put up with his crap. Well, I put up with his crap because he needs me. And what can I tell you, it feels good to be needed.”

      Okay, fine, I can buy that. To a point. Otherwise, how could I constantly deal with Tina and Luke’s string of crises? Why would I be here, for God’s sake? But there’s a difference between being needed and getting off on self-flagellation. And before I realize it’s coming, I hear myself say, “But the way you let him yell at you—”

      “That’s right. I let him yell at me. Because I make the money and I bought the house in Bucks County and I’m paying for our daughter to go to NYU and yelling at me is the only way he can still feel like the protector.”

      Right. A protector who constantly tears down the person he’s supposed to be protecting? I’m sorry, but this is seriously not working for me.

      “Oh, ditch the outraged expression, Ellie,” Nikky says with a gravelly laugh. “It’s all…posturing. He’s never laid a finger on me. And he did put everything he had in this business when I started out. Everything. If I live to be a hundred, I will always owe him for that.” Then she looks at me, hard, like a teacher awaiting my response on an oral exam.

      “So…you’re happy?”

      Her laugh startles me. “God, you’re so young,” she says, and probably would have said more if her phone hadn’t rung just then. Grateful for the interruption, I scurry out of her office and back to my cubby-of-the-week, wondering how fast I can get my work done, wondering what’s up with Tina and Luke, wondering why a woman like Nikky Katz would be so willing to settle for…whatever it is she’s settling for.

      And thanking my lucky stars I’m not like that.

      chapter 3

      The bad news is, it takes me nearly an hour to make the trek on the A train from midtown Manhattan to Richmond Hill. The good news is, our house is only a few blocks from the subway stop. And it’s at the end of the line, so if I pass out—which has happened more than once—the conductor usually gives me a poke to make sure I get off.

      Except for a few months, I have lived my entire life in this neighborhood. I don’t hate it, exactly, but the place is like quicksand. The harder you fight to get out, the more it sucks you back in. I’ve watched too many of my friends from high school settle into virtually the same lives as their parents had, even if they moved to another neighborhood, to Ozone Park or Forest Hills or Jamaica. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as long as you’re sure that’s what you want.

      I don’t.

      And yet my entire body betrays me, sighing with relief the minute I set foot on Lefferts Boulevard. For good or ill, this is home, has been my entire life, and there’s something to be said for leaving the stresses of the city behind on the train. I can almost hear them, banging and howling as the train pulls away on the elevated tracks overhead.

      I breathe in the bitterly cold, damp air as I clomp along, my toes freezing in these damn shoes (you will rarely find me in flats—without heels, I look like I’m standing in a hole). Pushing out a crystallized sigh, I pass the duplexes that were pretty much all single family homes when I was a kid, now almost all turned into apartments. Cooking smells accost me as I walk, cruelly taunting my empty stomach—East Indian, Caribbean, Asian stir-fries, the occasional whiff of something solidly middle European. We live near the end of the block, our pair of semidetached houses the same baby blue with white trim as they have been ever since I can remember. Twin front yards flank identical stoops, each just about big enough for ten blades of grass and a tub of marigolds or impatiens in the summer, although the Nyugens installed a small, gurgling fountain on their

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