Eleven. Drinking the Hot Cocoa
Eleven
DRINKING THE HOT COCOA
Corey and his kids had to pop in at the bakery, so he and I made plans to meet up tomorrow, the first day of the competition.
Now that I’m on my own again, I’m not quite sure what to do.
I know I’m not going to loiter at the inn while Grant’s around, so I head down the steps and fruitlessly amble down Ninety-Fifth Street in search of something to help me take the edge off, but in Sweetville, just like in a Heartfelt movie, the edges are taken off already, the way moms cut crusts off their kids’ sandwiches.
I’m approaching a restaurant called Lotta Love Pub—in its Powell Park iteration, it was Dan’s Man Cave—with some hope for a cocktail or at least a cutesy craft beer, and I see Santa standing outside, ringing a bell.
“Hello there!” he booms. “So, are you adjusting to your new digs?” He’s smirking ever so slightly, and I see a touch more of the CVS drunk in his expression.
“How did you get here?” I ask him. “One second, you’re fall-down drunk outside CVS, and now you’re sober Saint Nick?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean. But a little elf told me you entered the cookie competition,” he says. “I figured you had a sweet tooth.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “If I’m here, what’s happening in my real life? How are all the people I know sort of the same in here as back there? But the rest of the people I’ve never seen before. I repeat, this doesn’t make sense.”
“Does it make sense that I can visit millions of homes every Christmas Eve and be back in time for Christmas-morning cookie-nookie time with Mrs. Claus?”
“Ew, Santa.”
“I’m not that kind of saint,” he says with a shrug. “I suggest you keep on this path you’re on. The way this place works can be bendy—”
“Please don’t tell me how flexible Mrs. Claus is.”
“Nah—we have a special pillow for that.”
“TMI, Santa, TMI.”
“I wish more people knew about the other toys the elves can make. But if you’re going to be a prude, let’s just say your job is to take part in the whole thing. If you participate—if you believe—you’ll find things have a way of working out.”
“But I’m not a Christmas person.”
He offers up another maddening wink and scolds me with a twitch of his finger. “In a place like this, of course you are,” he says. “A certain baker seems to think so.”
“Corey?”
But Santa goes back to ringing his bell and very merrily accepts a dollar from a pretty woman in a green knit cap who is fortunate enough to have never contemplated Santa’s sex life.
I step inside the Lotta Love Pub, considering Corey. It’s true—I just fell into his arms on the street. But just because he didn’t want me to fall into traffic doesn’t mean he wants to date me.
I so would love a drink. But as I glance around, I can tell right away not to expect tequila shots.
The place I knew as Dan’s Man Cave not only is no longer a sports bar with walls of screens but also is missing its essential feature: the bar.
In its place is an old-school soda fountain counter.
A sign ringed in holly behind the not-a-bar states that Lotta Love has twenty-five varieties of hot cocoa.
Succulent cursive across the top of the sign says, Count down to Christmas by trying a different bespoke chocolate creation each day of December!
At every table are people swilling down the liquid confections, some of which have full-on slices of cake balanced on the edges of the mugs.
My sweet tooth doesn’t know whether to be intrigued or revolted.
But okay, it’s this or back to my parents’ house, and I don’t think I can find my way out of Sweetville if I bury myself in the guest room bedding.
Plus, if Brian and Rachel have left by now, the Sweetville heavy-petting version of my Dad might be showing my mom his Santa’s Little Helper, and I do not want to walk in on that.
I find a booth at the back of the restaurant and watch as a pretty Black woman with tinsel woven into her thick twists takes orders at a few tables. “Dad!” she calls out over the exactly-right-volume Christmas music playing on the sound system. “Where’s Madison?”
She gets no answer and lets out a breath of exasperation that only accentuates her excellent bone structure.
She sidesteps a man carrying a large gift-wrapped box, and then she’s standing over my table. “What can I get you today?” She glances at my outfit. “Cute pajamas. I like them with the boots. Are you going to the PJs and Presents gift-wrapping party at town hall?”
“Oh, um, yes,” I say, welcoming the excuse for traipsing through Sweetville in this getup while also thinking that of course there’s an excuse for me traipsing through Sweetville in this getup. “Do you need a minute?” I ask her. “You seem really busy.”
She shrugs. “It’s the holidays. And we’re shorthanded.” Her name tag says Millie . The doors at the front open, and as a customer walks in, I see her grin slightly. A handsome guy in a button-down shirt that’s not plaid—the only such shirt in the place, I think—has entered and peers around.
Millie is interested, judging from the way she quickly turns away and locks her gaze on me like she’s scared to stare at him.
“Oh, that stinks. I’ve had jobs like that,” I say.
Only, at Li’l Ballerz, the kids regarded me with muted disdain instead of cheerily smiling at me like they are at Millie.
Maybe they’re hopped up on Chocolate with a Twist of Trix, a cocoa drink studded with the multicolor breakfast cereal, or Santa’s Sweet Sippa, which appears to contain an entire six-inch chocolate Santa.
“It’s my sister, Madison,” she says. “She’s getting married, and she’s supposed to help out around here, too, but she’s so wrapped up in her wedding plans that she keeps disappearing on me.”
The button-down-shirt guy heads for the open booth two down from mine. Millie appears to be fighting her own body from leaning toward him as he walks behind her. I cock my head meaningfully in his direction. “Do you know him?”
“I wish I didn’t,” she says. “He’s from the city.
” The way she says “city,” it’s clear that his place of residence is its own red flag.
“I guess he’s down here to sell his grandmother’s old house, and my sister and her fiancé want to buy it, but he’s being such a stickler about all these little details.
Like, for example, he wants it in the contract that he can repossess it if they so much as change the paint color! ”
“Harsh. But he’s cute.” He’s not as cute as Millie, but he has a knockoff Chris Hemsworth vibe going on.
“Sure, but cute isn’t making any of our lives easier. I told my sister I’d talk to him for her. I do all the signage and naming for the restaurant, and she thinks that means I’m good enough with words to convince him to sell without all the ridiculous stipulations.”
So, we have a small-town (okay, small-suburb) girl going up against a city guy who’s trying to be a hard-ass in a real estate deal. But is he really a hard-ass? Or is he a secret softie?
“Maybe he’s attached to the house for other reasons, and it’s making it hard to part with,” I say. “What if you assured him that he’d get to visit it somehow… like maybe at Christmas?”
Millie’s eyes light up. “Huh. You just gave me a good idea. The Love family is known for welcoming new people to our table. Thus, the pub.” She gestures around.
“Maybe if I offer him an invitation to visit the place each Christmas and get Madison to keep a few things in the house the same, I can get through to him. So, what can I get you? I’ll give you a cocoa on the house. ”
City Guy, who’s sitting two tables away, clears his throat. “Is now a bad time to meet, Ms. Love?” But despite the impatient words, he’s throwing Millie eyes that indicate he could stare at her all day.
“I’ll be right there,” she says. She smiles back at me. “See? Kind of intense. But your free cocoa awaits.”
“Do any of the twenty-five varieties available come with a whole martini inside?”
Millie blinks. So, she likes my suggestion for moving her plot forward, but she’s not a fan of my problem-drinking humor.
“Never mind,” I say quickly. “Just the Chocolate with a Bow for me, please.”
“Coming right up,” she says. She clips by what I assume is her future suitor’s table on her way to the counter.
I wait, replaying my first morning in Heartfelt World.
So I can’t get ejected from Sweetville through sheer scrooginess or even public nudity.
And a Santa-like figure has told me there’s a story for me here, and that I’m—for all intents and purposes—a Christmas person now.
But that’s hard to believe. Even though I’m in a world where everything is merry and bright, I don’t feel like I belong, just like I was finding it hard to feel at home in the Powell Park version of Christmas.
My life is too much of a mess to be anything more than a holiday-spirit imposter.
It’s not that I truly hate Christmas or anything.
It’s more that I know Christmas and the holidays aren’t meant for me.
They’re for people like my mom or Corey.
People who get love right, who greet each day with a smile, who expect things to work out, even when life gets tough.
Eventually, Millie delivers a steaming mug of cocoa, complete with a bow that’s made out of white chocolate. I would have thought the inferior chocolate would be banned in Sweetville.
White chocolate adornment or not, the cocoa is outstanding.
And my booth is so comfortable. My shoulders, which are always up around my ears in LA, are only halfway up my neck now.
Maybe I can be a Christmas person. Maybe I can just stay here, drinking chocolate like one of Odysseus’s scouts eating lotus flowers.
Lose all track of time and memory and remain suspended in a chocolate fugue state forever.
Then “Wonderful Christmastime” starts playing over the speakers, and nope—I can’t live in a world where I might have to hear this song every day.