Chapter One

An hour before his world exploded like a ripe tomato under a stiletto heel, Myron bit into a fresh pastry that tasted suspiciously like a urinal cake.

"Well?" Mom prompted.

Myron battled his throat, won a costly victory, swallowed. "Not bad."

Mom shook her head, disappointed.

"What?"

"I'm a lawyer," Mom said. "You'd think I'd have raised a better liar."

"You did the best you could," Myron said.

She shrugged and waved a hand at the, uh, pastry. "It's my first time baking, bubbe. It's okay to tell me the truth."

"It's like biting into a urinal cake," Myron said.

"A what?"

"In men's public bathrooms. In the urinals. They put them there for the smell or something."

"And you eat them?"

"No-"

"Is that why your father takes so long in there? He's having a little Tastykake? And here I thought his prostate was acting up."

"I'm joking, Mom."

She smiled through blue eyes tinged with a red that Visine could never hope to get out, the red you can only get through slow, steady tears. Normally Mom was heavily into histrionics. Slow, steady tears were not her style. "So am I, Mr. Smarty Pants. You think you're the only one in this family with a sense of humor?"

Myron said nothing. He looked down at the, uh, pastry, fearing or perhaps hoping it might crawl away. In the thirty-plus years his mother had lived in this house, she had never baked - not from a recipe, not from scratch, not even from one of those Pillsbury morning croissant thingies th