Blooming All Over by Judith Arnold

supposed to hate each other.”
    “They thrive on that hatred. It feeds them. It nullifies all their positive energy. Haven’t you ever wondered why neither one has remarried?”
    Ron rolled his eyes. “Sounds like it’s time for some cheap psychology. Let me guess. You think they’re still in love, right?”
    Julia didn’t consider the possibility deserving of ridicule. “Do you? You know them better than I do.”
    “My parents got divorced twenty-two years ago. If they still loved each other, they probably would have figured it out somewhere along the way.”
    “But they never remarried.”
    “Maybe they decided they just weren’t cut out for marriage.”
    Which led to one of Julia’s biggest worries. What if Ron, their firstborn, the result of their genetic merger, the product of their rancorous household, was inherently not cut out for marriage? He’d asked Julia to marry him and she’d said yes, and he’d given her the most beautiful engagement ring in the world, nothing ostentatious, one single, perfectly set carat in a band of white gold. And he doted on her—when he wasn’t teasing her—and phoned her when he got held up at work and freely mingled his dirty laundry with hers. And when he made love to her, he made love to all of her, not just certain specific anatomical regions. He whispered to her and stroked her hair and peered into her eyes, and when they came he groaned with such sweet relief and gratitude and triumph, obviously as thrilled for her as for himself.
    He loved her. She was convinced of that. But what if growing up in a broken home had taught him damaging lessons about marriage?
    And what about her? Her parents had been married for thirty years and would still be married today if her father hadn’t eaten contaminated sturgeon and succumbed to salmonella poisoning two years ago. But her father had also been sleeping with Dierdre Morrissey at the office—tall, gawky Dierdre, the executive who knew the store better than any Bloom family member. Julia hadn’t learned about the affair until a year after her father’s death, and by then it had seemed quite beside the point. Dierdre was essential to the smooth running of the store, and if Julia’s mother didn’t mind having an office right next to Dierdre’s, why should Julia make drastic changes?
    Still, like Ron, she was the offspring of a dysfunctional marriage, even if no one had ever bothered toacknowledge how dysfunctional it was. Maybe she carried a betrayal gene within her cells. Maybe someday she’d turn to a skinny, buck-toothed assistant for comfort.
    Oh, sure. With a guy like Ron Joffe at home in her bed, she was going to look at anyone else?
    So maybe her marriage was congenitally doomed, and maybe it wasn’t. She still had plenty of other things to worry about. “My mother doesn’t cook very well, so I asked Lyndon to do the cooking.”
    “Then you have nothing to worry about,” Ron reassured her. “Lyndon’s a great cook.”
    “But Grandma Ida isn’t invited. She’s going to be pissed that Lyndon is taking off the evening and leaving her all alone in her apartment so he can go downstairs to my mother’s apartment and whip up a feast for us.”
    “So invite Grandma Ida,” Ron said calmly, as if it were the most reasonable idea in the world.
    “Are you kidding? She’d dominate the entire evening. She’d issue edicts. She’d insist on controlling the whole wedding.”
    “She’d probably come down on your side,” Ron pointed out. He toyed with her feet, running that mischievous index finger between her toes, over her polished nails, up and down her instep. She considered slapping his hand away, but his touch felt too good. She would simply have to keep her mind focused and not let him detour her.
    “What do you mean, my side?”
    “She’ll want the wedding catered by Bloom’s, won’t she?”
    “Who knows? With Grandma Ida—” her toes wiggled when he located a ticklish spot along her