Love You a Latke - Softcover

Elliot, Amanda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593815831 ISBN 13: 9780593815830

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Love comes home for the challah-days in this sparkling romance.

Snow is falling, holiday lights are twinkling, and Abby Cohen is pissed. For one thing, her most annoying customer, Seth, has been coming into her café every morning with his sunshiny attitude, determined to break down her carefully constructed emotional walls. And, as the only Jew on the tourism board of her Vermont town, Abby's been charged with planning their fledgling Hanukkah festival. Unfortunately, the local vendors don’t understand that the story of Hanukkah cannot be told with light-up plastic figures from the Nativity scene, even if the Three Wise Men wear yarmulkes.

Desperate for support, Abby puts out a call for help online and discovers she was wrong about being the only Jew within a hundred miles. There's one other: Seth.

As it turns out, Seth’s parents have been badgering him to bring a Nice Jewish Girlfriend home to New York City for Hanukkah, and if Abby can survive his incessant, irritatingly handsome smiles, he’ll introduce her to all the vendors she needs to make the festival a success. But over latkes, doughnuts, and winter adventures in Manhattan, Abby begins to realize that her fake boyfriend and his family might just be igniting a flame in her own guarded heart.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Amanda Elliot lives with her husband and daughter in New York City, where she collects way too many cookbooks for her tiny kitchen, runs in Central Park, and writes for teens and kids under the name Amanda Panitch.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Outside the picture window of the café, snow drifted to the sidewalk in big fluffy flakes. Sleigh bells jingled on the speaker overhead, not quite covering up the burbling sounds of the machines behind me. Scents of gingerbread and mint drifted through the air. And, in my head, a Category 2 headache was pinching the area between my eyes and radiating back toward my ears.

There are five categories in ascending order of least to most severe, in case you're wondering.

"Sir, I don't know how many more times I can say it," I told the beet-faced man on the other side of the counter. He wore flannel like most of the other people who stopped in for coffee or a pastry, but he wasn't a local. It was easy to tell who was and wasn't a local when there were only a few hundred of them. "I can't give you a refund when you drank the entire thing. I can give you a new coffee. For free. For your trouble." So you'll get out of here and leave me alone.

The man glowered at me like I'd told him his beard was patchy. "I could barely taste the gingerbread. It didn't fulfill the expectations I had of a gingerbread coffee. I don't want a free mediocre coffee. I want my money back."

Excuse me, my gingerbread coffee was not just far from mediocre; it was excellent: I'd spent days perfecting the exact blend of ginger, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, and nutmeg to flavor the coffee without overpowering it. I'd even added a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes in the mix to mimic that gentle burn a good gingerbread cookie gives you in the back of your throat. Whenever I finished stirring a new batch of it up, it smelled exactly like I'd dropped a warm, fresh-out-of-the-oven cookie into a vat of coffee. The first time I'd tasted it I'd literally pumped my fist in the air-that glorious sensation of achievement that comes from creating some excellent piece of art. Yes, fun drinks were art. "Then you should have said something after your first sip or two," I said. "It couldn't have been that bad if you drank the whole thing."

"I wanted to see if it would get better as I went on. Maybe all of the syrup had settled at the bottom."

I had to hold myself back from rolling my eyes. Except fuck it, that was a really eye roll-worthy thing to say. I rolled my eyes. My brain was now throbbing. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

And then he said my absolute favorite thing problem customers said, the glorious seven words that made the throbbing in my head shrink into glee. "I'd like to speak to your manager."

I drew myself up so that, despite our height difference, our eyes were level. And I smiled. Not my fake, stretched-
out customer-service smile, either. A real, true, toothy grin. "Sir, I am the manager."

I could've gone on from there. Because I wasn't just the manager. I was the owner. Well, technically the renter. But either way, I was the one in control of this warm, cozy space and the apartment above it. Another thing that had given me a glorious sense of achievement: running my own business at the age of twenty-eight and not having to answer to anyone else about how I spent my time or what drink specials I wanted to put on the board or how I wanted to talk to my customers. I didn't think I could ever go back to working for someone else again.

"Whatever," the man grumbled. He shook his head. "If this is how you treat your customers, you won't be in business much longer." He pointed at the menu board. "If your gruesome drawings don't put you out first."

I turned to look at my menu board, where I'd written all of our seasonal specials in chalk. Next to the gingerbread coffee listing I'd drawn a cheery gingerbread man going for a quick dip in a hot tub-esque cup of coffee. Though looking at it now, the gingerbread man did kind of look like he was screaming. (I was about as good at drawing cheer as I was at faking it. In other words, not very.) And you could possibly interpret his raised arms as flailing with panic.

The man was already storming out, but I wasn't going to let him have the last word. I called after him, "It's a festive doodle!" The door slammed shut with the tinkle of a bell.

I took a deep breath. His words rang in my head. You won't be in business much longer. They were just the nasty words of an aggrieved customer, I told myself. Not prophecy.

Though you didn't need to be a prophet to read what the profit margins of the last few months were saying.

No matter. I didn't have time to waste stressing over it or feeling sorry for myself. I turned my attention to the next customer in line, who was bound to be annoyed after the long wait. "Good morning, how can I help you?"

As I realized who I was speaking with, that Category 2 headache slammed back into my skull so hard it flipped right into a Category 3, which would ache at least as long as the person who caused it was in the vicinity. As long as he was in the vicinity, I should say. Because Category 3 headaches were reserved for one special customer.

"Beautiful day today!" said certain customer chirped, beaming a mouthful of very white teeth in my direction.

The snow had stopped falling, leaving a murky gray sky behind. The temperature was supposed to hover at that sweet spot between freezing and not freezing, so that what snow was left on the ground would turn into a nasty wet slush and anything that came down the rest of the day would be a sleety, icy rain. "It's supposed to be wet and rainy all afternoon."

His smile didn't waver. "Who said rain can't be beautiful?"

Ugh. When I closed the café at four and walked outside, I'd probably find him singing and dancing as the water poured around him, his tap shoes somehow magically not slipping in the slush. "What can I get you, Seth?"

It was truly a shame he was so annoying, because if not for the whole personality thing, he'd actually be handsome. I'd perked up the first time I saw him walk through my door, his green flannel setting off broad shoulders beneath dark hair that curled around his strong cheekbones.

And then he'd opened his mouth. Something he insisted on doing way too often each time I saw him. Now, instead of just telling me that he wanted a pumpkin spice latte with whipped cream-what he gets from October through December each year-he said, "Man, I wonder what that guy before me was going through. It must really be a lot for him to act like that."

I should have known better than to take the bait. I really should. But the man's words were still smarting at me, like poking at an already aching bruise. You won't be in business much longer. "Or," I replied, already mad at myself, "maybe he was just a jerk."

"Maybe he was tired and somebody rear-ended his car yesterday and his head hurt and he just wanted to feel like someone was taking care of him," Seth said.

"Or maybe he was just a jerk," I said. "Lots of people are. What do you want, Seth?"

"To continue believing that humanity is generally good, and that people who behave badly usually have a reason for it," he said. "Also a pumpkin spice latte, please. With whipped cream."

"Latte coming right up." I felt a little better as soon as I turned my back to run the machine, breathing in the sweet steam bath of coffee and sugar. He probably assumed I drank my coffee black and strong, but I actually loved a good pumpkin spice or vanilla or hazelnut cream latte. See? Just because I saw humanity as it really was didn't mean I was some sad, bitter person who snubbed anything sweet and indulgent.

Not that he'd gotten to me, or that anything he could say would ever get to me. I was one hundred percent right, and he was one hundred percent wrong. If he thought there weren't plenty of people out there who weren't jerks just for the sake of being jerks, he clearly hadn't met very many people.

As the machine...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593815831
• ISBN 13: 9780593815830
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland