Mrs. Fitz dived under the table. “You haven’t been shot, you old dunce. It’s the cereal.”

Jake jumped to his feet and clamped a dinner plate over the almost empty bowl.

“What is this stuff?” Berry asked, her eyes wide.

Jake cautiously removed the plate. The cereal was bloated with milk, making soft snuffling noises. “I don’t understand this. It never did this before. Maybe it was the way you were stirring it.” He took the box of cereal and Berry’s bowl and descended into the basement with them.

Mrs. Dugan shook her head. “This never happened when we lived in the Southside Hotel for Ladies.”

Mrs. Fitz picked cereal out of her hair. “Yeah, that place was boring. Filled with old people.” She shivered at the thought.

Miss Gaspich folded her napkin. “I like it here. I wish he hadn’t taken that cereal away. I wanted to try some.”

Berry stared at the cellar door, wondering what was down there. Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory? Finally her curiosity grew stronger than her embarrassment. She excused herself from the table and cautiously opened the basement door. “Jake?”

“Mmmm.”

“Can I come down? Will anything else explode?”

“Take your chances.”

Berry looked around the cluttered, well-lit room. Kites, model airplanes, wind socks, and bicycle wheels hung from the ceiling. The walls were lined with bottle-laden shelves and crowded bulletin boards. Countertops held robot innards, computer equipment, and sacks of rice, whole wheat, and corn. There were toys everywhere: decapitated dolls, fuzzy bears, motorized skateboards, boxes of puzzles. Jake sat at a massive oak desk, intently staring at a soggy particle of cereal speared on a long skewer. Berry moved behind him. “I feel like I’m visiting Gyro Gearloose.”

“Most of this stuff belongs to my sister’s kids. I’m the toy fixer. The trouble is they break them a lot faster than I can fix them.” He looked around the room. “Some of this is mine. The kites and planes and wind socks are mine.”

Berry looked sidewise at him. “You told me you didn’t have any toys.”

“There are all kinds of toys. These are little toys. I didn’t think we were talking about little toys.”

“So you have exploding cereal and a bunch of little toys. Are there any other surprises I should know about?”

“I almost never have surprises. My life is an open book.”

“Un-hunh.”

“Go ahead, ask me anything,” Jake said.

“Did you give me that exploding cereal on purpose?”

Jake feigned outrage. “Moi?”

Berry sat on a tricycle. “Okay, so go ahead and tell me. What’s this big plan you’ve got?”

Jake leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk. “We’re going to get married, buy a couple dogs, and have a whole bunch of kids. Maybe a hundred. Although I’m negotiable about the kids. One or two would be enough.”

“I don’t want to get married. Been there, done that.”

“Not ever?” Jake asked.

“Maybe someday, but not for years and years.”

“I don’t want to wait years and years. I’m pretty much ready to get married now. Today or tomorrow would be good.”

The man was insane, Berry thought. Fun… but insane.

“I have work to do. I don’t have all day to stand here and talk about marriage,” she told him. “I have to make pizzas. I have to wash the floor. I have to study for an art history test. And by the way, you’re a nutcase.”

“I’m not a nutcase,” Jake said. “I’ve met a lot of women and I’ve waited a long time for the right one to come along. And you’re the right one.”

“How can you be sure?” Berry asked. “How do you know?”

“How long do we have to discuss this?”

Berry looked at her watch. “Seven minutes.”

“Not nearly long enough,” he said. “You’re going to have to go with the short version. I know, because I just know.”


* * *

Mrs. Fitz spooned sauce on the pizza rounds laid out on the paddles, and Berry added green peppers, onions, and crumbled sausage. Six large pizzas, always the same, every day, for the lunch buffet at the Hill Top B &B.

“How did you come to live at the Southside Hotel for Ladies?” Berry asked.

“When my Edward died I couldn’t see living in our big house anymore, so I sold it and bought a racehorse.”

Berry froze in mid-pizza making. “What?”

“His name was King Barnaby Von Big Bucks. Didn’t seem like I could go wrong buying a horse named Von Big Bucks.” Mrs. Fitz sighed. “Just goes to show.”

“Why on earth did you buy a horse?”

“I took one of them senior citizen bus tours of big houses with gardens and such. And this one house was a horse farm and one thing led to another and I ended up selling my house and buying a horse.”

“Must have been some horse.”

“Yeah, he was a beauty.”

“What happened?”

“Turned out he was pretty, but he wasn’t real fast. I think that horse liked coming in last. I owned him with two other people and they wanted to send him to the glue factory, but I just couldn’t do that. So I bought them out with the rest of my house money and gave King Barnaby to some nice young couple that had a lot of land and wanted a horse as a pet.”

“And then you were broke?”

“Well, I didn’t have my nest egg anymore, but I had social security and some money from Edward’s pension. It was enough to pay for my apartment but not enough to buy one of the new condos. And what with the cost of living now, it’s hard to find another apartment I can afford.”

The door to the pizza shop opened and a rangy, scraggly-bearded kid strolled in. Berry assessed him at late teens. He was wearing a lumpy, wrinkled raincoat and a navy knit hat over brown, shoulder-length hair. It was mid-morning and not a lot of people came in for pizza midmorning.

“Can I help you?” Mrs. Fitz asked.

“Maybe,” he said.

His eyes darted around the room, taking in the ovens and the workstation and the three small tables with chairs for walk-in customers.

“We don’t have any pizzas for take-out made up yet,” Mrs. Fitz said. “But we’d be happy to take an order.”

The kid took a semiautomatic out of his raincoat pocket and pointed it at Mrs. Fitz. “How about you just empty your cash register,” he said.

Berry and Mrs. Fitz froze.

“Now!” he said.

Berry carefully moved to the cash register. “We haven’t got much money,” she said to him. “We just opened up.”

“Whatever,” the kid said. “Just hand it over.”

“Honestly,” Mrs. Fitz said to him. “Don’t you have anything better to do than to rob two women? You should be ashamed.”

“And you should be dead,” the kid said. “How old are you, anyway?”

Mrs. Fitz narrowed her eyes and gripped the sauce ladle. “I’m not too old to take care of you. You need to learn some manners.”

Berry had a hundred dollars in twenties and fives in the cash register. She gathered them up and held them out to the kid.

The kid moved to Berry, reached for the money, and Mrs. Fitz whacked him on his head with the sauce spoon. Pizza sauce splattered everywhere, and the kid’s eyes went blank for a moment. Mrs. Fitz gave him another klonk on the head, and he staggered back and dropped the gun.

“Are you okay?” Mrs. Fitz said to him. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

The kid shook his head and looked at his hand. “I’m bleeding. You just about killed me.” And he turned and ran out the door and down the street.

“It was pizza sauce,” Mrs. Fitz said.

Berry dialed the police and reported the attempted robbery.

“They’re sending someone over,” she told Mrs. Fitz. “Lock the door until the police get here and leave the gun on the floor. And don’t tell anyone else about this.” Especially don’t tell Jake, she thought.


It was ten o’clock at night and Berry and Jake sat in the dark, looking out the window of his station wagon.

“I’ll be right back,” Berry said. “This is the last pizza of the night. As soon as I get this sucker delivered we can go home.”

“Sit tight,” Jake said. “I’ll deliver it.”

“Thanks, but I’ve got it.”

“The hell you do. I’m delivering this pizza.”

“It’s my job, my Pizza Place, my pizza.”

Jake looked at the dingy yellow brick apartment building. “It’s late, and that’s a four-story walk-up in a lousy neighborhood. I’m not going to sit here cooling my heels while you’re in some dark hallway quietly getting mugged.”

“I’ve delivered pizzas here before.”

“Good. Now it’s my turn,” he said, grabbing the pizza box. “Lock the doors when I get out.”

Berry grabbed the other side of the box and tugged. “You’ll deliver this pizza when pigs fly.”

Jake gasped and looked out the window. “Look at that!”

Berry strained to see. “What?”

Jake jumped from behind the wheel with the pizza and slammed the door shut behind him. “Flying pigs,” he called to Berry.

Berry narrowed her eyes. “Son of a beet!”

She stomped into the building and climbed the stairs, catching Jake on the third floor.

“I hate being told what to do,” Berry said to Jake. “Nobody can tell me what to do. This is my business. That was my pizza.”

“After we’re married this will be a community property pizza. You might as well get used to it.”

“Read my lips. We’re not getting married.”

“You’ll come around,” Jake said, knocking on an apartment door.

“If I wasn’t so tired from all those stairs, I’d kick you in the knee,” Berry said.

The door opened and an old guy with a lot of tattoos and gray hair tied back into a ponytail looked out at them. “What is this, tag team pizza delivery?”

“She’s crazy about me,” Jake said to the old guy. “Follows me everywhere. That’ll be ten bucks for the pizza.”

The guy handed the money to Jake. “I should have problems like that,” the guy said.

“It’s not as good as it looks,” Jake told him. “She snoops in men’s windows and once she smashed my pizza.”

“She don’t look violent,” the guy said.

“Looks can be deceiving.”

Berry turned on her heel and stomped down the stairs. She was all the way to the foyer before Jake caught up with her.

“That was embarrassing,” Berry said to Jake.

“Yeah, but he gave me a nice pity tip,” Jake said. “We might have something here.” Jake opened the downstairs door and stared at the empty street. “Where’s the car?”


It was almost one o’clock in the morning when Jake and Berry trudged through the front door of his house. They silently made their way to the kitchen and began fixing a midnight snack of gigantic proportions. They carried the contents of the refrigerator to the round oak table and in the silvery light of moonbeams scoffed down pickles, sandwiches, ice cream, potato salad, and a pint of strawberries.

Jake pushed back from the table while Berry picked at the last strawberry.

“It’s okay,” Jake said. “I’ll rent a new car in the morning. The police were pretty reasonable, considering that’s the second car we’ve had stolen in less than a week.”

“In less than a week I’ve squashed a Jeep, I’ve had two cars stolen, and my apartment’s been charbroiled.” And I’ve almost been robbed at gunpoint, she silently added. “Do you think someone’s trying to tell me something?”

Jake shrugged. “That’s just the negative side. What about the plus side?”

“What have I got on the plus side?”

“Our friendship.”

Berry’s heart got happy. Jake Sawyer thought their friendship was important. Imagine that. He liked her! He really liked her. She thought about their earlier conversation in the basement and his cavalier assumption that they’d get married. Was he serious? She rolled her eyes. Of course not! You don’t just come out and announce to a woman that you’re going to marry her and have a hundred kids and community property pizza. Besides, he’d had plenty of time to continue the conversation in the car on the way back to his house, but he’d never raised the subject. A wave of disappointment washed over her. Oh, great, she thought with a grimace. Disappointment. I’m in big trouble here. My emotional clock is not in tune with my plan.

She would have to be strong. She would refuse to fall in love-and if she already was in love she would refuse to admit it. What she needed was some good old-fashioned hostility. A mean streak to cover up all those cozy feelings.

Jake took her hand in his and tenderly kissed the inside of her wrist.

Berry snatched her hand away. “Don’t kiss my wrist.”

“Okay. What would you like me to kiss?”

“I don’t want you to kiss anything.”

“What a load of baloney.” He took her hand back and kissed the soft center of her palm. “How about if I kiss your-”

“Don’t you dare!”

He sucked on the tip of her index finger. “Can I kiss it in the shower?”