Love You a Latke

Chapter 15

15

Since we obviously wouldn’t be lighting a menorah with Seth’s friends tonight at the Christmas festival, we made sure to light the candles with Seth’s parents before leaving. They had their menorah all set up in their window the way you were supposed to, so that it beamed its light to everybody else on the street. A major part of Hanukkah was being loud and proud about your Jewishness, paying tribute to the Maccabees who’d died fighting against assimilation by defiantly sharing your menorah in a world full of Christmas lights.

We were on the seventh floor, so probably nobody could see ours from the street, but it was the thought that counted.

“Bring home one or two of Kylie’s ornaments for me,” Bev said to us from the couch, where she and Benjamin were sitting on opposite ends, Bev focused intently on some streaming romantic drama while Benjamin was just as intently focused on the thick hardcover in his lap. Bev seemed to be the kind of person who didn’t put on pajamas until she was actually in her bed, but she had changed out of her day wear into what had to be expensive fuzzy lounge pants and a sweatshirt. Benjamin seemed to be the kind of person who slept in pressed pants and a button-down, so he wasn’t in pajamas, either. “I like to give them as gifts to those who celebrate Christmas.”

Seth promised we would, and then we were out into the chill of the night. I’d dressed up a little bit in a burgundy sweater dress, black boots, and a matching scarf, while Seth was in his usual jeans and flannel. But maybe because I was looking fancy, Seth declared we’d be taking a cab instead of the subway.

I wasn’t going to lie: I felt a little bit like I was starring in a Christmas rom-com, sitting in the back of a yellow cab as the bright lights of the city whizzed past me, Times Square billboards shouting out holiday specials of TV shows and sidewalk trees strung with twinkling lights, packs of tourists roaming with Santa hats on and glimpses of tall, stately Christmas trees strung with glowing white orbs standing proudly in the lobbies of fancy doorman buildings.

Of course, it ruined the effect a little bit when Seth gallantly opened the cab door for me and I stepped right into an ankle-deep puddle of murky gray slush. RIP, nice leather boots.

I shook it off as Seth helped me up the curb, thanking the cabdriver before he sped away, splashing my boots with more murky gray water. Why did I even bother?

This Christmas market was all the way downtown, smaller than the big, more commercial one in Union Square but just as cheery and festive. A perfectly conical Christmas tree peaked above the booths from the center, garlanded in red ribbons and covered in so many loops of twinkling multicolored lights that I could hardly see the green boughs. The booths themselves weren’t much more than tents over rickety wooden tables, but the smells floating out from them were warm and welcoming: spicy gingerbread; oozy melted chocolate; mulled wine warm with cinnamon and cloves. The laughs of children and cheerful calls of vendors echoed from the aisles, too. The whole effect was warm and cozy, exactly what I wanted for my own festival.

I turned to Seth to tell him this, but he was distracted, eyes sweeping the crowd in search of the friend group. His mouth opened in a silent hail as he raised his arm, and just like that, we were getting hugged by a bunch of wool-wrapped arms and squeezed by fleecy fingers. “So glad you could come!” Dan said to Seth, slapping him on the back.

Someone else hugged me lightly from the side. “So glad you could come, too,” Freya said to me, her smile a flash of frost pink and blinding white.

I was surprised to feel genuinely happy to see her. It had been so long since I’d had a real friend who was a girl. Not that one night of being nice to each other in a bathroom made us friends. But I’d seen friendships founded on less.

Before I could respond, the Mikes were all on me, and they were introducing their various dates and other friends they’d brought along, who blended into one amorphous mass of sparkling earrings and crisp wool pea coats and boots that were somehow not gritty with dirt and slush. I smiled and said, “Nice to meet you,” so many times that the words lost all meaning, making sure to keep by Seth’s side so that he couldn’t disappear and leave me all alone with these people. Not that he would. And not that it would be so bad if he did.

I just felt more secure having him there by my side.

As if he were reading my mind, he grabbed my hand. I looked over to find him smiling at me, and before I could help it, my lips curved themselves up at him. Of course he hadn’t read my mind. He was just remembering that we had to put on a show for his friends.

Christmas music jingled cheerfully over loudspeakers as we made our way into the maze of booths and tents, sleigh bells and bright trumpets. We passed a potpourri seller, the smell of dried flowers and pine making me a little dizzy, then a waffle stand. I didn’t know what loaded waffles had to do with Christmas, but, my god, I suddenly realized I’d never wanted anything more than a hot cinnamon waffle filled with cookie butter and drizzled with salted caramel.

“Your eyes are gooey,” Seth said. “Like a bride’s on her wedding day.”

“Only if that bride is walking down the aisle to a hot cinnamon waffle filled with cookie butter and drizzled with salted caramel.”

Seth’s hand, still in mine, pulled me toward the stand. “Come on.”

“Won’t we lose your friends?”

“We’ll catch up.”

The line was long, but it moved quickly. My insides were melting like that warm salted caramel I was dreaming about. Seth glanced down at me, his smile deepening. “You know, you’re kind of looking at me like…”

“Like what?”

He shook his head. “Never mind.” He stepped up to the counter to place our order.

He’d better not have been about to say I was looking at him with those gooey eyes. Because I definitely wasn’t. That look was reserved for waffles and waffles only.

And it was fully deserved, by the way: that waffle was delicious. I chewed slowly, hoping I hadn’t gotten caramel all over my face. “So good.”

“Do I get a bite?” Seth asked, giving me puppy dog eyes.

My initial reaction was to say no, because other people’s dirty mouths on my food equaled gross, but I hesitated before the word could come out. He had just bought the waffle for me. And somehow I didn’t think of Seth’s mouth as dirty. Also, more importantly, we had to put on a good show for his friends. His friends who were off somewhere ahead of us.

“Oh my god,” Seth said, mouth full. “I, too, would marry this waffle and have little waffle babies.”

“You didn’t think this through,” I told him. “Because the way that ends is with me eating your wife and children.”

“A sacrifice I am willing to make. As long as I get a bite.”

True to Seth’s word, we were able to catch up with his friends. Kylie’s face split wide open in a smile as she saw us approach her booth. Like most of the other craft tables, it was a rickety wooden stand cloaked by a red cloth roof, every inch of it displaying her homemade ornaments. “You came!”

As she and the others caught up on what they’d been up to over the last couple of days, I browsed her offerings. I’d never been a crafty person myself, so I appreciated the extra effort that had clearly gone into crocheting and beading and knitting every miniature Santa hat–wearing octopus and red-nosed reindeer and glittery silver dolphin that didn’t seem to be celebrating Christmas outwardly at all, which made me feel inclined toward it. I picked it up between my fingertips, rolling it over to examine the tight weave of pearly gray yarn and metallic silver thread. The dolphin’s eye gleamed rhinestone, and it was probably just the light, but it seemed to be staring right at me.

“You get a friend discount, if you want it.” I jumped when Kylie appeared right in front of me with a toothy grin. “Twenty-five percent off.”

I rolled the dolphin around in my hand. I didn’t have a Christmas tree. It didn’t make sense to buy a Christmas ornament when I didn’t have a Christmas tree.

Only just because it had a hook didn’t mean it had to go on a tree, right? I couldn’t help but picture the bare walls and surfaces of my shitty little apartment. They’d never bothered me before. Honestly, it wasn’t like they bothered me so much now. I’d gotten used to them.

But maybe this little dolphin would look nice chilling on my fridge, or hanging out on a windowsill, where the sunlight would make it glitter. Maybe I’d smile when I saw it in a month or a year from now, when this whole adventure was nothing more than a memory, when Kylie had made a whole new stable of ornaments I wouldn’t be here to see.

I cleared my throat. What the hell. “I’ll take it.”

As I tucked the small brown paper bag containing my new friend into my purse, Seth appeared at my elbow, sipping on what smelled like hot cocoa with a kick of cayenne. “It’s not anywhere near as good as yours,” he said. “Want some?” I was all sugared out from my waffle and cookie butter, so I shook my head. “Which ones should we get for my mom? She likes to give them to the doormen and cleaning lady along with their holiday tip. Says it adds a personal touch.”

By the time we’d selected a cheery turtle with a red-and-green-striped shell and an assortment of safari animals wearing Santa hats, the group was beginning to trickle onward through the festival. I grabbed a mug of mulled wine from a booth on the way, partially because I liked holding the smells of orange peel and cinnamon and nutmeg under my nose—another entry for my spa one day—but mostly because my hands were freezing.

We were standing around, Seth off talking to Dan and a Mike, me content to stand there breathing in the mulled wine steam and occasionally drinking it, when Freya sidled up next to me. Her ears and forehead were covered by her powder blue knit hat, her chin and mouth cloaked by a matching scarf, so that all I could really see were those pale blue eyes and two bright circles of pink on her cheeks. Like Seth, she held a hot chocolate in a paper cup decorated with snowflakes. “The city still treating you well?”

I wondered if “the city” actually meant the city, or if it meant Bev. Either way, the answer was, “Still good. What have you been up to for the holidays?”

Her older brother and his fiancée were in town, she told me, which was nice because they lived in San Francisco and she didn’t get to see them much. “They’re talking about having a baby soon after the wedding, which is so exciting. I can’t wait to be an aunt. I mean, I can’t wait to be a mom, but being an aunt will be fun until then.”

I stretched my mouth into a smile. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d interacted, truly interacted, with a child under ten. Sometimes parents brought them into my coffee shop. They seemed like an alien species, saying things I didn’t understand and making expressions that meant the complete opposite from what they actually meant and sometimes letting out sudden, startling shrieks from nowhere that made me jump. It wasn’t that I didn’t like kids; I just didn’t understand them.

But Seth? Seth would be an incredible dad. I could see him patiently teaching a kid how to play T-ball, helping them with math homework, weaving ribbons into braids (after patiently learning how to braid). A contrast to me as a terrible, awkward mom, if I even wanted kids.

“Wow, congratulations to them,” I said. A bitter taste rose on the back of my tongue. I took a sip of my mulled wine to chase it away, but it didn’t budge. “When’s the wedding?”

Freya told me all about how they were planning the wedding for next winter here in Manhattan, and her brother was going to wear a white tux, and they were hoping for real snow but had already reserved some fake snow just in case. “And I’m going to be the best woman, of course,” she said. “He’s five years older than me, so we weren’t all that close as kids, but we became pretty close once he went to college and we were no longer in the same house to fight over everything we could think of. You know, Seth apologized to me.”

I blinked. The sudden turn in the conversation had thrown me for a bit of a loop. “What?”

“Seth,” Freya said. “He apologized to me for how our breakup worked out. You know, with the ghosting. Just now, when we stepped away for hot chocolate.”

While I was looking through the ornaments. It was good of him to keep it between him and Freya, so that she wouldn’t feel obligated in front of the group to accept it. “Oh,” I said. “That’s good, I guess.”

“Real relationship or not, you’re a good influence on him.”

I didn’t know why hearing that made me feel so awkward. All I knew was that I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “It’s cool your brother made you best woman. Do you wear a suit for that?”

She didn’t seem bothered by my own turn in conversation, only chattered excitedly about her lacy blue dress in the same color as the groomsmen’s ties. “And what about you, Abby? Do you have any siblings?”

I took a sip of my mulled wine. It was starting to get lukewarm. “No,” I said as breezily as possible. “I’m an only child. Do you have any other siblings?”

“No, just me and my brother. Where did you grow up?”

Sweat broke out on my forehead. What was with all these questions? Why did all these people want to know about my past? It’s a normal thing to ask , the rational part of my brain reminded me, but the rest of me wasn’t having it.

Maybe this was why my approach to my past had worked so well so far: because I wasn’t letting anyone get close enough to me to ask these normal, boring questions.

I was getting a tension headache. Category 1.

Part of me wanted to make up an excuse to push Freya away. But I couldn’t do that. Not if I wanted to be a Good Fake Girlfriend.

And, honestly? It felt kind of like I was making a girl friend for the first time in a long time. And making a friend felt pretty nice.

“In the area, actually,” I said. Having already been through this today, making the words come out was less stressful. “But I wasn’t sad to leave it behind. I really like it in Vermont.”

She propped her scarf-covered chin on her glove-covered hand. “Ooh, right. I’m kind of jealous of your life. At least the running-a-café part of it. When I was little I used to want to run a bakery, at least until I found out how early you have to wake up every morning and how little you get paid.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Don’t those things also apply to being a kindergarten teacher?” I cringed inwardly at myself, hoping I hadn’t just insulted her, but she just laughed, too.

“Oh my god, you’re telling me. People seem to think I just chill out and play with little kids all day. But do you know how hard I work? I’m teaching them to read and behave in public with other little humans for the first real time in their lives. I bet my job is harder than that of at least half the lawyer and marketer and programmer parents of my kids who think I don’t do anything all day.”

“Oh my god, same here,” I said emphatically. “People think running a café is easy and romantic, that I just chill out whipping up fun drinks and gossiping with the townsfolk. But it’s such hard work. I bet I wake up almost as early as a baker, and…”

We went on for a while, comparing and complaining about how hard our jobs were. By the time we’d run out of things to say, Freya’s hat had slid up and her scarf had slid down, exposing rays of staticky white-blond hair and a chapped lower lip, and I was pretty sure I had a serious case of wild eyes. I took another sip of my mulled wine. To my surprise, I was almost at the bottom of the cup. Also, I had no idea where Seth was. “What are we doing right now, by the way?”

Our group had spread out a bit, and I realized we’d been shuffling along behind them as they slowly moved toward something. Like we were waiting in a line. Freya said, “I have no idea. Hey! Seth!”

There he was. He’d turned his back to talk to one of the Mikes, but he’d been there all along. “You guys seem to be getting along well.” The smile he gave us was surprised but pleased, a little guarded. I guess the thought of Connor and Seth interacting gave me similar feelings, even though Seth wasn’t even my real boyfriend. Something about the past and present meeting, two people who both knew intimate versions of you from different times.

“We totally are,” I said. “Freya is great. She’s been telling me all sorts of embarrassing stories about you from when you two were together.”

His eyebrows jumped to his hairline. “Please tell me she didn’t tell you about the lobsters.”

“I was joking,” I said. “But now I need to hear about the lobsters.”

“Oh my god, okay,” Freya said. “So we went away to Maine for a long weekend over July Fourth one year, right? And we decided to host a lobster cookout for all our friends. We went to the store and picked out live lobsters and everything. Only—”

“—only we couldn’t bring ourselves to kill them,” Seth said, a smile twitching at his lips. The memory might have been embarrassing, but it was also clearly fond. “Freya cried when it came time to put them in the boiling water. So then we looked up other ways to do it, and apparently you can kind of cleave them in half through the brain and that kills them instantly, except—”

“—except Seth got all freaked out by how they moved and couldn’t get his knife in place, and he was panicking about cutting into the wrong spot and causing the lobster pain,” Freya said.

“So when all our friends got there, expecting some delicious grilled lobster rolls and lobster salad and whatever else, we were just standing there with our live lobsters squirming around the yard,” said Seth. “By then we’d named them.”

“After various Disney Princesses. We had Belle, Aurora, Jasmine, Cinderella—”

“—Snow White had a big white blotch on her claw—”

“And so obviously, the thought of eating them was a lost cause,” Freya said. “We ended up having a ceremonial release and ordering in from the local burger place.”

“I know it seems hypocritical, because cows, but at least we didn’t know their names,” said Seth.

I wondered if they would stop laughing if I told them the one time I’d cooked lobster I’d had no problem tossing that sucker into the water and closing the lid.

I automatically stepped up again when they moved forward. Freya and some of the Mikes struck up a conversation, leaving Seth and me in relative solitude. “Freya told me you apologized to her.”

“Yeah. It was long overdue, and I’m glad you pushed me to do it. I’m surprised she told you, though.” He raised an eyebrow. “You guys really do seem to be getting along well.”

“Is that okay?”

“Of course it’s okay,” Seth said. “I’m happy about it. You’re both people I care about very much.”

That awkwardness squirmed in my stomach again. We stepped up once more, following Seth’s friends. I asked, “Are we in line for something?”

And didn’t need a response, because then I noticed it: the banner proclaiming MEET SANTA! in big red letters. Kids dressed like elves in pointed plastic ear bands and forest green outfits flanked a Santa who might have been out of a movie, big and round and red and jolly, with a bulbous nose and full white beard that might actually have been real. “Ho, ho, ho!” Santa called out joyfully into the wind.

I nudged Seth with my elbow. “Why are we waiting to see Santa?”

He shrugged. “Dan thinks it’s funny for us all to get pictures with him.”

Fine, whatever. The line crawled forward. A Mike and his date went up first, each perching precariously on one of Santa’s knees. It was hard to see who looked most afraid that the old man might collapse. “Have you ever had a picture with Santa before?” I never had. My parents had obviously never taken me, and I’d never gone on my own.

He shrugged again. “Dan used to drag us before I moved.”

The Mike and his date finished without crushing any elderly knees and got up, ceding the space to Dan and his friend. Dan leaned in to whisper in Santa’s ear. I tried to picture myself doing that, and it felt…weird. Not bad weird, necessarily, like I would be doing something wrong. But uncomfortable weird, like trying to put on pants that no longer fit or eating eggplant, which for most people was great but for me made my throat itch.

“I don’t know if I want to do this,” I said.

“You one hundred percent don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” Seth said. Of course not, but opting out when everybody else was doing it would still get me weird looks, make me feel like I alone wasn’t part of the group. “Just out of curiosity, what’s giving you pause?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” I said, something in my stomach squirming. And I really didn’t. All I knew was that the thought of it gave me that “this isn’t quite right” feeling.

I hadn’t felt truly Jewish in many years, not until this trip. Maybe it had something to do with that. Not that Jews couldn’t go take pictures with Santa Claus if they wanted to—Seth was evidence enough of that. It wasn’t like it made them less Jewish. But for me? It just didn’t mesh.

I wondered if this was what the Maccabees had felt like when the king ordered them to start worshipping the Greek gods. Only on, like, a way, way, way lesser scale. And with a far smaller chance of ending in blood and fire.

“Yeah, I think I’m going to sit this one out,” I said, and saying it felt right: the pants suddenly grew enough to fit, the eggplant morphed into a potato latke. “You should do it if you want, though.”

“And leave you sitting out alone? A good boyfriend wouldn’t do that.”

“Seth!” Dan called out, unfolding himself from Santa’s lap, where somehow he’d managed to curl up. “Abby! Your turn!”

Seth stared back at him. Right. Seth’s inability to deal with conflict. I braced myself for getting dragged over there no matter how I felt. Which, again, if it took that to be a Good Fake Girlfriend, I could live with it. I grabbed his hand and squeezed through his glove.

Though I’d meant it to communicate how I was feeling, it made him stand up straighter and clear his throat and say, “We’re good, man. Freya, Mike, you guys go ahead.”

He fell back, shrinking a little bit, as if bracing himself to get yelled at.

But, of course, that wasn’t what happened. Dan just shrugged and said, “Okay! Freya, Mike, you’re up.”

As the rest of the group clustered around Santa and their friends, hollering suggestions on what they should ask for for Christmas, Seth pulled me to the side. Not the side of the crowd but, like, the side of the festival. And not the cool side, the side that guests weren’t supposed to be on. The wrong side of the alleyway, the back side of one of the rows, where boxes of extra supplies waited in stacks and electrical cords snaked over the dirt in complex tangles that probably violated several safety standards. The smell of smoke drifted toward us, which panicked me for a second before I noticed the small group of workers taking a cigarette break down the other end of the aisle.

At least this wasn’t where they put the trash.

I was a little worried something was wrong with Seth that he needed to talk to me in such privacy, and then I saw his exultant smile. “I did it,” he said. “I mean, I know it was such a small thing to basically everybody else with a pulse, but did you see it?”

I cracked a smile back. “Way to deal with conflict in a healthy fashion.”

Seth gestured back toward his friends with his chin. “I’m not sure why I didn’t want to say anything where they might overhear. It’s a little embarrassing, I guess, that it felt like such a big deal to me.”

“I get it,” I said. “I mean, you shouldn’t be embarrassed, but I understand what it feels like when something that feels so big to you feels so small to everyone else.” See: being able to answer basic questions about your parents and family.

“Yeah.” He smiled down at me again, and I suddenly realized how close we were to each other, so close the edges of our coats were touching, so close I could feel his heat radiating even through all my layers. No, that had to be my imagination. And we were only standing so close because the aisle was so narrow. “And look at you, Ms. Hanukkah Spirit. Refusing to assimilate.”

My own smile was tiny, closed-lipped. “Isn’t it funny how Christmas and Hanukkah are kind of lumped together because they’re both in the winter and became examples of ‘the holiday spirit’ when they’re so different?” I laughed a little, remembering Lorna’s vendor friend Fred, dismayed at the actual story of Hanukkah. Sounds bloody. Judah Maccabee would hopefully approve of me not wanting to sit on Santa’s lap.

He wouldn’t approve of you bending to Lorna the way you did on the phone, though , part of me whispered. I did not really want to listen to that part of me, especially not now, with laughter all around us. You’re basically the Jews who said, “Sure, I’ll worship Zeus and sacrifice pigs on the sacred altar.”

Okay, I was definitely not as bad as the Jews who worshiped Zeus and sacrificed pigs on the sacred altar. Was it really that big a deal to let Lorna have a few non-Hanukkah things at our Hanukkah festival? It wasn’t like Hanukkah was even a major, super important holiday, and my goal with the festival wasn’t to present the world with a pure-as-the-sacred-oil vision of the holiday. It was to bring tourists to town and save my café.

My lips parted before I could think too much about it. “Do you think I’m doing the right thing? With the festival?”

I hadn’t thought it possible for Seth to move closer, but he did. He leaned in so that his nose practically brushed mine, and yep, now I could definitely feel the heat coming off him, his breath tickling my baby hairs. “What did you say?”

This close, looking him in the eye was almost paralyzing: in the shadows, his were so dark, so deep, that I was afraid I might fall in and never be able to claw my way out. But I couldn’t look away, even to use that old middle school trick of talking to the middle of the person’s forehead so that it looked as if you were eye to eye but really you weren’t.

“The festival. Lorna. You heard our call earlier, where I gave in to her on some of the Christmasy things she wants to make the Hanukkah festival more…broadly commercial, I guess,” I said. We were only one to two percent of the American population, so basically anything made to cater to us also had to cater to the general Christian population or it couldn’t be broadly commercially successful. “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”

“Do you really have much of a choice when it comes to Lorna?” His lips parted, his tongue dipping out to lick them. Maybe a drop of hot cocoa had gotten caught on his lower lip.

“Did the Maccabees have a choice when Antiochus ordered them to worship Zeus?”

Seth’s lips quirked. “I think the stakes are a little bit lower in this case.”

I didn’t laugh. “You didn’t answer.”

“What do you want me to say?” He shrugged. I could feel the waves of movement in the air. “I think you have to do what’s best for you and the festival, and if that means letting Lorna have her way a little bit, then so be it.”

“Okay.” I still wasn’t feeling great about it, but, to be fair, it was hard to feel anything besides how hard my heart was thumping at Seth’s proximity. We were so close now I could’ve stuck my tongue out and swiped that drop of hot cocoa from his lower lip. So close I could touch my forehead to his and breathe in deep that citrusy smell of his. So close I could—

“Abby?” Seth’s voice was hoarse. His hand was suddenly on the side of my head, the pressure gentle but firm. My heart skipped a beat. Was he leaning in? Was he going to—

“Seth? Abby?”

I jumped away, my back hitting the canvas wall of a booth. My heart felt like it might leap out of my throat. “Freya?”

Sure enough, Freya was standing there near where we’d come in, poking her head into the aisle, pale eyebrows scrunched in light concern. “What are you guys doing back here? We’ve been looking for you.”

Seth had also moved away into the back side of a tent, his arms now crossed. His body language couldn’t possibly have been any more closed off. I almost had to laugh. I couldn’t believe I thought he was going to kiss me. Our relationship was fake. We both knew that. Just as we both knew I would be a terrible real girlfriend for him, and he would probably be a terrible real boyfriend for me.

Still. For a second there, it had really seemed…

“Kylie’s closing up and we’re going to head out for a drink,” she said. “You guys coming?”

Seth looked at me like he was asking if I wanted to go. I shrugged. “Sure, if you’re up for it.”

Freya clapped her hands together. Because of her gloves, they didn’t make a sound. “Okay, yay! Let’s go.”

Better not drink anything more tonight , I thought as I trailed after them. Mocktails only. Because clearly my mind couldn’t be trusted.