Chapter 6
Few things made Marisa happier than hearing the targeted beep of her restaurant supply store’s membership card being scanned upon entry.
Some safe places designated themselves as such with signs, inclusive graphics, and open-armed social media campaigns.
Others, like Dining Depot, were innately safe, especially during the holiday season, for one particular reason.
Only those in the catering and restaurant industries could garner a membership, thus keeping out the general public who would happily judge a woman for buying an eighty-piece bucket of blueberry candy canes.
Which Marisa, with Eden in tow, needed post-frickin’-haste.
“All right,” Eden said, doing her best to keep pace while balancing an egregiously large tub of red and green kettle corn on her hip. “So, you have a boyfriend now.”
“Fake boyfriend,” Marisa huffed out, quickening her steps.
“I don’t know. He looked pretty real to me. Nothing fake about the way those muscles filled out that suit. I could see the contouring and definition all the way from the bar, even with the shitty lighting.”
“Still a fake boyfriend. Now, where the hell are they? They had the peppermint ones out front, but not the blueberry. Ugh. I hate when they rearrange the seasonal displays. Can’t they just keep everything in the same place?”
Marisa’s worried thoughts had successfully managed to chase her to the next aisle before Eden, with all that superhuman barkeeper’s upper arm strength, hooked Marisa’s elbow and yanked her to a halt.
Cornered in front of the twenty-pound buckets of fondant, Marisa had no choice but to get good and right with the woman leveling a tub of kettle corn under Marisa’s chin like a fencer’s épeé.
Eden shifted her shoulder to block the candy canes that Marisa was still straining to see. “No, no, no. You don’t get to change the subject. For the first time in—”
“Don’t say forever.”
“—forever you have a boyfriend, a booming opportunity to score a spot on Monica’s coveted List at the holiday event of the season, and we haven’t even gotten into the birthday festivities yet!”
Marisa cringed and tried her best to shrink away from the wall of atrocities that was corn syrup, sugar, and water, but it was no use. They both knew she couldn’t continue to ignore the scary pile of life-changing events climbing onto her back.
Or the occasionally scarier enthusiasm of her best friend hopped up on Red 40 and Green No. 3.
There was a damn good reason Marisa insisted on using natural food dyes in her candy, and she was looking at it.
“I’m not avoiding anything.” Mostly. “I’m having dinner with Alec tonight at Sal and Enzo’s.
We’ll figure out what this whole charade should look like, and we’ll go from there.
” Despite her best efforts to infuse the lowest amount of chill into the remark, even Marisa couldn’t keep back a wince.
Nerves tended to have that effect. So did spending the past day and a half since the cocktail party reliving every single horrifying rumpled shirt-stained detail of what she must have looked like striking a dating/business bargain with a sports star.
One whose gracious smile she couldn’t stop thinking about, a smile she’d be seeing a lot more of very soon.
But she could hardly focus on that when she’d run herself ragged brainstorming what she could serve at the Crystal Christmas Ball and how to entice untold numbers of people to come visit her booth.
Beyond upping her meager ad spend and making more social media posts that the algorithms would suppress into oblivion anyway, she was at a complete loss for how to achieve the latter.
Somewhere during the past several frantic hours of planning, analysis, ledger reviews, customer orders, customer complaints, and the two social media posts she’d uploaded that had taken her four frickin’ hours to design, she’d accepted her fate and spiraled into a depressed heap on her living room floor.
Millions. Phoebe had millions of followers, on multiple platforms, likely fueled by a goddamn team of tech-savvy people working around the clock to pump out content about the Christmas Ball.
Knowing Phoebe, she’d probably already ordered merch and was actively sending out influencer care packages about her vendor offerings.
While Marisa had lukewarm coffee, a caffeine headache from said coffee, a combined total of forty-six social media views—screw you, algorithm—and Joe the bagel guy saying he’d make sure her flyers would be put front and center at his shop, right between the twenty-year-old lollipop dispenser and the coffee-can-turned-donation-bin for the local animal shelter.
In other words, Marisa had bupkis.
Her only recourse against spiraling out completely was indulging in the one thing her festive-season-loving heart could always rely on this time of year: artificially flavored and coincidentally Hanukkah-colored blueberry candy canes.
A treat she only ever felt comfortable procuring at Diner Depot beneath its cavernous roof of judgment-free resplendence. Plus, they sold hot dogs.
“And as far as birthdays go, why don’t we just keep it low-key this year, huh?
You know, pretend like thirty is just another blip on the radar.
Perhaps over the Bermuda Triangle. During a freak electrical storm.
It wouldn’t happen to be a leap year, would it?
Doesn’t weird stuff always happen on leap years?
Stuff we should pretend never actually happened? ”
Eden dove her hand into the popcorn bucket but still didn’t move an inch. “You mean like people getting to celebrate their actual birthdays for the first time in four years?”
“Sure, that! Weird stuff. So, maybe this isn’t the year to lean in so heavily on my birthday.
I mean, I get to celebrate mine every year.
How selfish is that?” Marisa tried to laugh, but the effect was ruined by a nearby spilled bag of cornstarch that had decided to atomize in her lungs, causing her to choke out the word selfish with an inappropriate amount of raspy inflection.
The sole benefit of her near-death experience? Eden finally backed off when Marisa almost coughed into her friend’s kettle corn.
“It might be, except that we’re talking about two different calendar years, let alone calendar months.” Eden narrowed her eyes. “Why are you being weird?”
“Why are you being weird?”
“What are you not telling me?”
“Nothing. Can we get my candy canes now?”
“Fine,” Eden relented. “You know, you’re the only Jewish person I’m friends with who has this as their Hanukkah tradition.”
“First of all, I’m your only Jewish friend period. And when you can’t stand black and white cookies or jelly doughnuts and still want to share in the magic of the holiday season with everyone else, your options are limited.”
Eden wrinkled her nose. “But they’re blueberry. You don’t even like blueberry.”
“Irrelevant. They’re blue and festive and exactly what I need right now if I’m going to make it through the next few weeks.”
And that was the crux of the dirty little secret her family had never been able to understand.
When it came to carving out a place for herself, Marisa had long ago landed on the fact that she was the blueberry candy cane.
An anomaly, a fraud. An unglamorous holiday season misfit that didn’t quite measure up to expectations.
A fruity treat when everything else was peppermint.
The right shape but the wrong color, though still always coming back year after year so Jews like her who were embroiled in all the Christmas wonder could claim them as their own and give them the homes they deserved.
She was the Jewish girl who, after years of floundering and buying degrees she couldn’t bring herself to try on fully, had finally found her calling in the sugar-coated fascination swirling around Christmas and other celebratory confections.
Her graduate studies couldn’t contribute anything to the joy that came with rolling out buttermints or making little marzipan gift-hugging teddy bears.
Which made her a big fat Frosty-the-Snowman-loving fraud.
Of course, it didn’t help matters that her love of candy making also coincided with a deeper and far more treacherous crime.
Despite her upbringing, as an adult, Marisa had become secular.
The word had been an unspoken stain on her adult life that had unleashed torrents from a wellspring of guilt, which truly had no bottom.
She didn’t keep kosher, always had to look up when the holidays were, and couldn’t remember any of the reasons for celebrating the holidays beyond Someone tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.
That wasn’t to say she didn’t have a love for her heritage, but explaining to her family that she always resonated more with the vibes than the plot was like a serial killer trying to convince Santa that a weeklong stretch with no brutal murders had to count for something, right?
Regardless, that never stopped her from buying every bit of Hanukkah merchandise the Internet had the gall to sell or getting swept up in the Festival of Lights, regardless of whether they were from a menorah or a twinkling strand wrapped around a Christmas tree.
And blue-and-white Santa hats? She owned three of them, all with varying amounts of glitter.
Even though she had found her quiet happiness and port in the storm, it didn’t make her life any less exhausting.
Jewish guilt, man. That shit was a killer.
Marisa had just made it to the bulk candy aisle when the sounds of “The Imperial March” echoed off the concrete floor. Her heart rate lifted out of her chest in time to every dun dun dun that projected in all its older-model-smartphone tinny glory from her right butt cheek.
She and Eden shared a look of grim determination before they launched into a synchronized routine as practiced as their senior year of high school’s winning lip sync number.