Love You a Latke

Chapter 17

17

I had to put those thoughts about Seth and me out of my head. I couldn’t be a good friend, or especially not a good fake girlfriend, with them rolling around in there. So I lay in bed that night with my eyes shut tight and took deep breaths, telling myself over and over that this wouldn’t be a big deal, that I only had to get through three more nights.

It was very hard to fall asleep.

I woke up after Seth did, meaning I was confronted by his neat pile of blankets and pillow on the floor. Rubbing my eyes, I scrolled through my phone for a bit, answering some emails I’d gotten about the café and the festival, then made a quick stop in the bathroom before padding out to the main space.

Right into the middle of an argument. I was glad I’d taken some time to myself before wading in. Seth was saying, “We really haven’t gotten any downtime yet. I was thinking we’d take the day easy, just Abby and me, maybe enter the lotteries for some Broadway shows or head out to Queens for some good Thai—”

“You two get plenty of time just the two of you back home,” Bev was saying in response, talking over her son. “You came to New York for family time. Besides, you’ll be able to do the event together.”

Seth’s shoulders were already starting to sag. He might have been able to stand up to his friends, but his mom?

And then he saw me, and something in his eyes flashed, like he was remembering our conversation. He stood up taller. “You should’ve asked us first,” he told Bev.

If I thought Seth’s eyes flashed, Bev’s eyes burst into flame. Not literally. But I was afraid to get too close to her in case they caught on my hair. “I didn’t think I needed to—”

“What’s going on?” I asked hastily, hoping to defuse some of this tension. Benjamin, who I realized just now was seated at the kitchen table, looked vaguely disappointed. Maybe that I hadn’t brought him any popcorn for the show. Plain, non-buttered popcorn, of course.

Seth and Bev both turned to me, opened their mouths, and unleashed a torrent of words at once. I caught maybe every other one. Today. Synagogue. Family. Chill. Tired. Cooking.

I held up a hand. “Sorry, what?”

Seth looked vaguely thrilled, Bev vaguely surprised: maybe that I’d dared interrupt her. Well, it was her own fault. She said, before Seth could speak again, “Every year we take part in a Hanukkah cookie decorating clinic at the synagogue. A bunch of people from around the city from all different synagogues come and participate. There are prizes and things. It’s a lot of fun, so I of course signed us up again this year.”

“And I said you should have asked us first,” Seth said. “Maybe we already have plans.” He gave me a questioning look. It was up to me, I guessed.

Honestly, last night had proved there were worse ways to spend a few hours than decorating cookies. And wasn’t it my job to make a good impression on Bev? So what if, when she gave me that look of approval, my insides went all warm like my teacher had just given me a gold star?

Still, I didn’t want to force Seth into something if he didn’t want to do it. A Good Fake Girlfriend wouldn’t throw her Fake Boyfriend to the wolves. So I just raised an eyebrow and cocked my head a little bit, doing my best to communicate all of that.

I expected very little. I’d never been called expressive, unless resting bitch face counts as an expression. But somehow Seth seemed to understand it. He gave me a small nod, then turned back to Bev. “Okay, fine. We’ll do it.”

“Wonderful. It’ll be so much fun.”

A couple hours later, after eating the leftover French toast (almost as delicious as freshly made), we were setting up in the social hall of their synagogue. Long tables lined the cavernous, high-ceilinged room, with place cards marking each team’s designated location. Bev, Benjamin, Seth, and I walked down the aisles of dirty green carpet beneath the huge chandelier, looking for our names.

Bev and Benjamin found theirs first. “Oh, this must be a mistake,” she said, looking at the settings on either side of hers. “You two should be next to us.”

“Oh, too bad, I wonder what happened,” Seth said in such a monotonous rush that I knew immediately he’d called the synagogue ahead of time and requested it. A tiny bit of passive-aggressive revenge.

We found our station at the far end of the room, near the door. Which satisfied me in a sad sort of way. I hated to even think it, but one thing I automatically did when being in a Jewish space was clock the exits. Just in case. We had enough room at the long table where we could stand side by side and only elbow each other if we were both using our elbows at the same time.

The cookies we’d be decorating weren’t there yet, but sitting on our station were some basics we’d need for the task ahead: frosting; little tubes of food coloring; a few different kinds of fun sprinkles. It looked as if there were more elaborate decoration options at a table along the side of the room, set up as first come, first serve.

All of my time lounging on the couch watching competition shows on the Food Network after Connor left me was now about to come in handy. “I think our strategy should be to run over and take the most desirable decoration options on that table first,” I said in a low voice, leaning into Seth’s ear so that he could hear me but the adorable old couple on my left couldn’t. “Granny and Gramps over here can’t make winning sparkly cookies if there aren’t any sparkles for them to use.”

Seth looked over at them. Granny and Gramps grinned cheerfully at us and waved enthusiastically in unison over their matching plaid aprons. He looked back to me. “You know, why bother with all the subterfuge? Maybe I should just tackle them if they try to take the sparkles. They can’t make winning sparkly cookies if they both have broken hips.”

“I didn’t realize you were that hard-core.”

“To be very clear, I was being sarcastic,” Seth said. “You understand that was sarcasm, right?”

I ignored him. “We also want to think originality. Humor is good. Neither of us are super artistic, so we can’t rely on making the most beautiful cookies and winning on that. No, we need to make the judges laugh.”

“You do realize the prize for this is a gift card to a really mediocre kosher restaurant, right?”

“No, Seth.” I tapped the side of his head solemnly. “The prize for this is winning. The knowledge that we are the best.”

“Will the knowledge that we are the best cookie decorators among a small subset of Upper West Side Jews help you sleep at night?”

“No,” I said. “It will animate the very core of my being.”

He shrugged. “Okay, in that case, you run for the sparkles and I’ll threaten Granny with our frosting knife.”

I held back a smile as a middle-aged woman I assumed was a volunteer approached each table with a box of plain cookies. That smile might have burst fully onto my face if she and I hadn’t recognized each other at the same time. My smile evaporated, sinking back into my throat where it formed a lump. Her eyes widened. “Abby Cohen, is that you?”

I couldn’t speak. All I could do was nod.

Mrs. Landskroner had clearly aged in the ten years since I’d seen her, but there was no mistaking my old Hebrew school teacher. She had to be in her late sixties or early seventies now, but her hair was still a glossy brown, and either makeup or good plastic surgery had softened the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. She smiled wide at me. There was a tiny smudge of lipstick on her front teeth. “Well, look at you. You’ve grown.”

Mrs. Landskroner hadn’t just been my Hebrew school teacher. She’d been my mom’s good friend. As much as my mom had good friends anyway.

I forced a smile. “That’s usually what happens after ten years.”

She set the white cardboard box of cookies on our station. “And who’s this?”

“This is Seth,” I said. It probably would have been a Good Fake Girlfriend thing to do to introduce him as my boyfriend, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Word would get back to my parents, one hundred percent. Mrs. Landskroner would probably text my mom the next second she got to herself. And then what? I’d left here for a reason. I didn’t want my parents knowing anything about me.

So I just kept it at that as I grabbed the box of cookies and opened it up, staring down at them as if I’d never seen anything more interesting than plain, slightly burnt sugar cookies in the vague shapes of menorahs and faces and Stars of David.

Mrs. Landskroner touched my shoulder gently. That, plus the scent of her lilac perfume, sent me tumbling fifteen years back into the past.

My skin crawled. I wanted to be anywhere other than here even though I wanted to ask her what my parents had told her about my move to Vermont, how they’d slanted it to make them look good and sad and self-sacrificing and me look bad and selfish and mean.

“Ellen!” someone called from down the line. Mrs. Landskroner’s head whipped around. Her hand withdrew from my shoulder, and I had to hold myself back from rubbing the feeling of it away.

“Be right there!” she called back, and then, with a quick smile over her shoulder at me, she was striding to the aid of whatever cookie-based problem the other volunteer was having.

My underarms were suddenly all sticky. How was I supposed to make funny, original cookies when this piece of my past was lurking about?

“Abby,” Seth said, his tone that of someone repeating something for the third or fourth time. “Abby, are you okay? You look a little shaken up.”

I caught a quick glimpse of myself in the reflective window behind us. To my own eye, I looked the same as always: vaguely annoyed. How could he see anything more than that when I couldn’t see it myself? “I’m fine.”

But my hands shook as I laid the cookies out on our paper-covered table portion, and I couldn’t stop my eyes from darting around me as we planned out our strategy. I volunteered to go grab supplies from the communal table mostly so that I could scope out the room: where the bathrooms were if I needed to flee a sudden approach of Mrs. Landskroner; where all the volunteers were stationed.

Seriously, what were the odds that someone from my past would be here?

Probably not that low, honestly. Even New York City, the biggest Jewish community in the United States, could feel pretty small. Everybody knew everybody. I was probably lucky it wasn’t my parents or other relatives popping up here. I might have fainted into my frosting.

Maybe I wasn’t as okay as I thought.

I pushed that disconcerting idea away as Seth and I got to work: we had a contest to win, after all, and I’d be damned if I’d tarnish the good name of my café and its baked goods in front of all these people (no matter that I didn’t bake most of them myself). I was carefully painting a Star of David into a stained glass beauty when I paused, an idea popping into my head. “What do you think about a cookie-decorating station at the festival?”

Seth didn’t pause in his decoration of a menorah cookie. As it turned out, there were only so many humorous things you could do with cookies shaped like that. While I thought turning one into an eight-legged octopus in flagrant defiance of the antisemitic stereotype of the Jew-as-octopus-with-tentacles-all-over-the-world would be both timely and funny, Seth assured me that it would not win the favor of the judges. Which was probably true. “I think it’s a great idea.”

I knew he wasn’t lying because he hadn’t hesitated before telling me my octopus cookie idea was terrible. A lightness filled my chest, one that very nearly distracted me from Mrs. Landskroner’s poisonous presence. “And it shouldn’t be too hard to organize. I can order plain sugar cookies from wherever, and then we just need to make sure we have stuff to decorate them with. Colored frosting, sprinkles, whatever.”

“People will love it.”

“Hopefully, Lorna will.” She’d probably insist on making sure we had candy canes and Santa sprinkles and lots of red and green frosting. “But I’ll deal with that when it comes to it.”

Fortunately, whatever Mrs. Landskroner’s volunteer duties were, they kept her busy for most of the event. I looked up at one point to find an older woman hovering over us, but it was just Bev. “Very nice,” she said, eyeballing my stained glass Star of David in particular, which made me proud. “I never thought Seth’s children would have any artistic talent, but seems there’s hope for them yet.”

Another thing we could deal with when it came to it.

An hour later, I was surveying our cookie spread with pride. Our Star of David, menorah, Judah Maccabee, dreidel, and wild card—a face shape that we’d turned into a scarily realistic latke featuring both applesauce and sour cream (didn’t want to alienate half the judging pool)—were not just finished, they were gorgeous. “If we don’t win this contest, that means it’s definitely been rigged. Just like the rainbow cookie one,” I said, side-eyeing Granny and Gramps’s shakily outlined menorah and splotchy dreidel. I picked up ours to compare, admiring them. “We didn’t even need to sabotage any—”

“Abby!” Mrs. Landskroner appeared in front of us again. The lipstick was still on her teeth. “Are you seeing your parents while you’re in town? I hope you are. I know your mother misses you.”

And that’s when it happened. I dropped my cookies. But I didn’t just drop them: I lunged fruitlessly to try to catch them before they broke, except I missed. And landed on top of our other cookies, palms first and hard.

Our beautiful winning cookies were nothing more than crumbs now. “Shit!” Absurdly, embarrassingly, tears stung the corners of my eyes.

Seth’s shadow fell over me, hovering with concern. “What happened? Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not okay!” I flung my arm out over the table, narrowly missing whapping Mrs. Landskroner on the boob. “Our cookies are ruined!”

“I wasn’t talking about the cookies. I was talking about you.”

I looked up to find him blurry and indistinct, but you couldn’t mistake the emotion in his eyes.

Pity.

Mrs. Landskroner was saying something about how it was such a shame and our cookies had been so beautiful, but I could barely hear her over the sound of my own stomach heaving. Pity. I didn’t want his pity. I didn’t want anyone’s pity. A headache exploded behind my eyes, threatening to make me vomit.

So I finally listened to my first instincts, and fled.