Love You a Latke

Chapter 2

2

I usually closed the café up around four, after the lunch rush (in other words, my usual ten regulars stopping in for a salad or a fancy grilled cheese that was fancy because I used Gorgonzola and put fig jam and arugula on it). My headache was finally beginning to dissipate as I slipped my silenced phone out of my apron pocket for the first time in hours.

Some invoices due I’d deal with after I ate my own lunch (a decidedly non-fancy grilled cheese made with whatever leftover bread and cheese I had in the back before it could go stale or moldy). Some spam emails—those I deleted. A few requests for collaboration with other town businesses—the bookstore wanted to know if I’d consider stocking a few punny cookbooks to try to drive traffic to their store; the craft store asked if I’d want to sell some of their soaps in exchange for them selling bags of my coffee. Those I starred to deal with later, too.

And about a million texts, all from the same group chat. I sighed through my nose. The first one was from Lorna Begley, the president of the town’s small business council, which I was on by virtue of running a small business in town. Emergency mtg at 5pm today in craft store. Very imprt.

I massaged my temples. Lorna held a whole lot of emergency meetings. Usually, they were because she’d spotted a mouse in her store or heard a rumor that a movie might be filming a few towns over, but occasionally they were about something serious, like when the diner on the town outskirts had burned down and she wanted to brainstorm ideas on how to raise money to rebuild, or when major floods similar to the ones that had hit our town a few years ago were forecasted again. I did not want to deal with Lorna or her weird, unintuitive text abbreviations tonight, but I couldn’t skip just in case it was something real.

So instead of replying-all and blowing up everyone else’s phones, I just reacted to Lorna’s text with a thumbs-up.

Which she reacted to with snark as soon as I showed up to the meeting. “Oh, Abby,” she said, glancing up briefly from her phone. “I wasn’t sure if you were coming, since you didn’t reply.”

I gave her my best stretched-lip customer-service smile, trying to counter the usual resting bitch face. I’d gotten enough snark from Lorna asking why I always looked so “angry” or why I couldn’t be “happier” around the “holidays.” “I liked your text. That meant I was coming.”

Her own return smile was equally insincere. “Oh. I see.”

If my café was barely staying afloat despite being the premier (read: only) place in town to get decent coffee and a quick lunch to go, I had no idea how Lorna’s craft store was still in business. She sold goods for tourists, of which there weren’t enough these days: fancy soaps shaped like trees and infused with maple syrup; earrings made of wire in the shape of maple leaves; T-shirts with sayings like I tapped that in Vermont . I at least got business from locals. No local would be caught dead with anything in this store.

Lorna and I might have stood there giving each other dead-eyed smiles until meeting time, but someone cleared their throat uncomfortably behind me. It was a familiar throat clearing, one I was used to hearing before its owner asked me if I could show him where the cleaning products were (even though cleaning the bathroom was one of his only chores) or if I could please just apologize to his grandma to keep the family peace (even though I’d always been perfectly polite to her and she was the one who’d called me, to my face, a “humorless money-grubbing bitch not good enough to scrape [her] grandson’s boots”).

I took a deep breath, fully ready for the headache to flare into a full-on Category 4 as I turned around. “Connor.”

To his credit, Connor had his shoulders hunched forward like he was trying to fold himself up and disappear, which was difficult when you were precisely six-foot-four and had ears that flamed bright red with any feeling of embarrassment or nervousness. I’d noticed it even in the near-darkness of the grubby Brooklyn dive we’d met at after matching on Hinge. Back then I’d found it endearing.

But that had been a very long time ago. He scratched his reddish curls, grimacing. “Hey, Abby. Been a while.”

It really had been, which, to think about it, was impressive in a town with less than six hundred full-time residents and only one main street. I wondered where he was getting his coffee now. Probably letting his mommy make it for him in a standard coffee brewer. “Yeah, I guess,” I said, like I didn’t know it had been exactly eight months and four days since he dumped me. Which, in turn, was three and a half years after I moved here for him.

You might wonder if I regretted it. I didn’t. Not only did I like running my café, something I could currently only have afforded in a tiny town like this, but I’d gotten used to the parade of locals. We might not all be friends—look at Lorna, for example—but we knew all of our businesses and our livelihoods depended on one another, which meant that I knew I could depend on them no matter what. And because I’d moved to town on the arm of a local, I’d been welcomed into the fold, where I’d stayed even after he dumped me.

If I lost my café and had to go somewhere else, I wouldn’t just lose my own business, I’d lose all of that. Small communities like this were usually suspicious of outsiders. And I couldn’t afford the delightful anonymity of a big city.

I shook off the thought. “What are you doing here?”

I didn’t mean for it to sound accusing, but he still took a step back like I’d threatened him with the knife on the table beside us, which had a maple leaf–shaped handle (not just impractical but uncomfortable, too). “Uncle Joe and Aunt May are on vacation, and you know Donny’s good for nothing, so they asked me to take over management while they were away.”

I nodded. Made sense. Connor freelanced in web development, which made it possible for him to take shifts at his aunt and uncle’s restaurant when he was needed. They’d often drafted me back when we were dating, too. I didn’t miss it. If I never had to smell a maple-glazed pork roast or maple-bacon sweet potatoes again, it would be too soon.

Connor nodded back, hands stuffed in the pockets of his flannel. I had nothing else to say to him, so thank god Lorna chose this moment to announce, “Okay, looks like everybody’s here. Let’s get started.”

I beelined toward her like I was desperate to hear every word she said, feeling a weight lift off my temples the more steps I took from Connor. Lorna raised her eyebrows at me in the barest nod of approval, which was a bonus. Not that I needed or wanted her approval. It was better for the business to have her not annoyed with me.

She clapped her hands together. “All right, everyone,” she said, and the murmurs of the twelve or so business owners faded into the faint jingle of the Christmas music still playing overhead. “I’ll cut right to the chase. We’ve all seen our business dip over the past few years, so we all know we need more people coming by or we’re in trouble. I want to hold a holiday festival here in town.”

The murmurs rose again, covering up the cheery tune of the currently appropriate “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town.” The thought of a Christmas festival—because, let’s be real, when people said “holiday” they meant “Christmas”—made sense, I supposed. Some of the nearby towns hosted big Christmas festivals full of gingerbread houses and hot chocolate and lines to sit on Santa’s lap, and they attracted crowds looking for Christmas cheer amid snow and small-town charm. I’d suggested holding one of them to the small business board years ago, when I was fresh and new here. Back then Lorna had told me there were too many in the area to make ours stand out, but she must have changed her mind.

“Awesome,” Connor said. “I know Uncle Joe’s always wanted to play Santa Claus. It’s probably too late for him to grow his beard out, but he’s got a fake one in storage just in case. Smells a little like mothballs, but the kids won’t care.”

Lorna gave him a toothy grin like she was ready for dinner and he was an animal who’d just walked into her trap. “Ah. When you heard me say ‘holiday,’ you thought ‘Christmas.’ But that wasn’t what I meant.” She paused for dramatic tension. “There are too many Christmas markets around here for a new one to stand out. What we’re going to hold is a Hanukkah market. And Abby is going to run it.”

My first thought: huh, I didn’t realize there was another Abby in town.

My second thought, as all eyes in the room swiveled to me: oh, shit.

“You don’t mean me ?” I blurted.

Lorna’s grin widened. I’d always thought she had too many teeth for her face. Now there they all were, wide and sharp, ready to chomp down on me. “Congratulations, Abby!” She began to clap. After a moment, the rest of the room started clapping, too.

This was all going way too fast. “Wait a second,” I said, then raised my voice and repeated it so that everybody could hear me over the applause and the music (now “Silent Night,” decidedly not appropriate). “Wait a second!” The clapping petered to a stop, but the eyes stayed on me. My skin itched. “I don’t understand. Nobody talked to me about this.”

“Well, I mean, it’s obvious.” Lorna sounded as if she were talking to a very small child. “You’re the only Jewish person on the council.” She left the “or in town” unspoken. “Who else could run it?”

Sweat broke out, chilly on my forehead. It was already dripping down the back of my neck and soaking into the collar of my sweater, which now itched even more against my skin.

I didn’t think I’d ever talked about being Jewish with the people in town (to be fair, I didn’t talk about most things with the people in town). How did they even know? I imagine asking Lorna and receiving her scornful response. Your name is Abigail Cohen. And besides. Her hand waving vaguely at my face, at my thick dark hair and prominent nose. There was no one way to look or sound Jewish—I’d grown up with blond Jews who had tiny noses, Black and brown Jews, Jews with last names like O’Brien and Chiang—but there would be no use telling her that.

It wasn’t like I was trying to hide being Jewish. It was a part of me like my freckles or my tendency toward dark humor. It was more like, why bring it up? I wasn’t observant. I didn’t keep kosher or need days off for the holidays. And I certainly wasn’t part of the Jewish community anymore. I’d left that behind when my parents left me behind.

I was certainly not going to bring that up with her, though. Instead, I said, “Can we talk about this more? I’m not sure I have the time to—”

“Oh, it won’t be that much work,” Lorna replied. “I’ve already gathered all the vendor info from my friends who run the other holiday festivals. You just have to tell them what they need to do. And you’ve got time. It’s not even December yet, and the festival won’t be until the end of the month.”

I blinked. “At the end of the month? But Hanukkah is early this year.”

Lorna wrinkled her brow. The song overhead switched to jingling bells. “What?”

It had been years since I’d lit a menorah, but all holidays were automatically filled in on the calendar app I used. “Hanukkah starts soon,” I said. At her look of puzzlement, I continued, “Its date is based on the Hebrew calendar, which is a lunar calendar. So in some years it’s as early as the end of November or as late as January.”

Lorna shrugged. “Okay, but that doesn’t change the date of our festival.”

“If we’re going to do a Hanukkah festival, shouldn’t it take place on actual Hanukkah?”

She shrugged again. None of the other business owners seemed especially bothered, either, except for Connor, who looked kind of like he wanted to run away. But that had nothing to do with my questions about the festival. “Most of the Christmas festival revelers don’t come on actual Christmas. I don’t see why the date matters. Besides, that week between Christmas and New Year’s is when the most people have off, whether they celebrate Hanukkah or not.”

I opened my mouth to keep arguing—it just didn’t seem right!—but something stopped me. Why did I care so much? It wasn’t like I was observant. It wasn’t like I was planning to celebrate anyway. “Okay, fine,” I said, trying to ignore the unease simmering in my stomach.

Lorna clapped her hands together. “So you’ll do it, then!”

“What? That wasn’t what I said.” I still had so many emails to respond to, and I had to prep for tomorrow’s menu, and I had to clean out the whole café and, right, change that stupid lightbulb, and that was just today. “I still don’t think I have the—”

“We really appreciate it so much,” Lorna said loudly, bulldozing right over me. This time the group reacted, everybody nodding, probably relieved that all this work wasn’t getting dumped on their shoulders. “Can you believe there aren’t any Hanukkah festivals in all of New England? Imagine the untapped market in New York City and Boston. There are a lot of Jewish people there who aren’t currently being served.” She gave me a meaningful look. “It’s just what this town needs.”

My mouth snapped shut. It was hard to argue with her about anything that would bring people to town. The numbers on my latest balance sheet floated before my eyes the way they did every night when I tried to go to sleep. If putting on a festival would keep me in business, then maybe I should just do it. It wasn’t like I had to feel Irish to make mint-green coffee specials for Saint Patrick’s Day or Christian to order pastel pink pastries for Easter.

Besides, Lorna said she had all the vendors already, she just didn’t have the knowledge she needed. As distant as I felt from the synagogue I grew up in, I did still remember the basics. I could tell a food vendor to stock up on doughnuts and frozen latkes; I could make sure the lights guy sourced a menorah instead of an inflatable Santa. “Fine,” I said grudgingly. “I’ll need that list.”

Hanukkah was all about celebrating a miracle. If this worked out okay, I wouldn’t need a miracle to save my café—just a little extra work.