Holiday Grind Read online

  After closing early, my staff helped me pick out a New York white pine from the sidewalk vendor on Jane Street. As Tucker’s basso crooned “O Tannenbaum,” Dante and Gardner carried the tree back on their shoulders. Then I helped them set it up in the corner, we cut the bundling wires, and the tree’s springy branches unfurled, filling the entire first floor with the fresh, sharp smell of an evergreen forest.

  Esther (actually cheerful for once) began affixing bright red ribbons to the deep green boughs, and I dug out the lovingly packed boxes of antique miniature coffee cups and tin pots that Madame—the Village Blend’s elderly owner—had collected over the years. Then Tucker replaced our shop dinger with jingle bells, and Dante laid out the big red and green welcome mat I’d purchased the week before—the one that said Merry Christmas in a dozen languages along with Happy Holidays! Happy Chanukah! and Happy Kwanzaa!

  (Living in a city with as many cultural and religious differences as New York meant you were probably violating someone’s belief system just by breathing. Lofty words like diversity and understanding were often bandied about in hopes of fostering open-mindedness, but after living in this roiling mini-UN for the past two decades, I was convinced that the way to universal harmony lay in a more practical philosophy. A diversity of cultures meant a diversity of foods. Eat with tolerance, I say.)

  For a full hour, we continued decorating the coffeehouse, stringing white lights around the French doors, hanging fresh spruce wreaths against the casement windows. Finally, we put up quilted stockings over the hearth’s stone mantel, where one of Madame’s silver menorahs already stood, waiting for the Festival of Lights to begin.

  Peace on earth had actually been in play, until we all began judging each other’s coffee creations . . .

  Now, checking my watch, I tensed. Our guests would be arriving soon to sample our new holiday coffee drinks, and we were nowhere near ready.

  “Okay, that’s it!” I announced in a tone I hadn’t used since my daughter was in grade school. “No more bickering! Everyone behind the espresso bar! I want Christmas in a cup, and I want it ASAP!”

  FORTY-FIVE minutes later, two dozen bottles of sweet syrups were lined up on our blue marble espresso bar; stainless steel milk-frothing pitchers stood on the work counter behind it; and I was reviewing our hastily scribbled tasting menu.

  Tucker’s offerings included Butter Pecan Praline, Candy Cane (easy on the syrup), Iced Gingersnap, and Old-Fashioned Sugar Cookie. Dante’s flavors were Eggnog Cheesecake, Spiked Fruitcake, White Chocolate Tiramisu, and Toasted Marshmallow Snowflake. Gardner’s Christmas memories brought us Rum Raisin, Mocha-Coconut Macaroon, and Caribbean Black Cake. And from my own beloved Nonna’s Christmases: Candied Orange Panettone, Maple-Kissed Gingerbread, and Glazed Roasted Chestnut.

  Esther also had contributions: Apricot-Cinnamon Rugelach and Raspberry Jelly Doughnut because, as she quite rightly put it, “Chanukah has its own flavors.” For Esther, this also included Key Lime Pie because, as she noted, “Every December my family fled to Florida.”

  The invited guests of our latte tasting were now mingling near the crackling logs of the store’s hearth, waiting for us to whip up the samples.

  Tucker was entertaining his current boyfriend, a Hispanic Broadway dancer who went by the single name Punch. Gardner was playing host to Theo, Ronny, and Chick, the three other members of his jazz ensemble Four on the Floor. And Dante had invited his two aspiring-artist roommates: a pierced platinum-blond pixie named Kiki and a raven-haired girl of East Indian heritage named Banhi.

  Checking my watch, I decided to give our missing guests another ten minutes to show. Esther’s boyfriend—Boris the assistant-baker-slash-Russian-rapper—was performing at a Brooklyn club tonight. Since he couldn’t make it, she’d invited another taster, a friend named Vicki Glockner.

  Earlier in the year, Vicki had worked as a barista for me. She’d loved experimenting with our Italian syrups, and I knew she’d make a good taster, but I had mixed feelings about seeing her again because she and I hadn’t parted on the best of terms.

  My friend was late, too—although he’d phoned to apologize and warn that he might not make it at all. I couldn’t blame him. Since I began seeing Mike Quinn, I’d had to accept that a NYPD detective’s work was never done.

  My other tasting party guinea pig was now smacking his knuckles against the beveled glass of the Blend’s front door. I moved to unlock it and realized the night had grown colder and the snow higher. Fat flakes had been falling steadily for the last hour. Now they layered the sidewalk and street with several inches of crystalline frosting. As I pulled the door wide, the newly installed jingle bells sounded above, and a chilly wind gust sent a flurry of ice diamonds into my dark brown hair.

  “You actually made it?” I said with a shiver as Matteo Allegro stepped inside.

  TWO

  SKIN still lightly bronzed from the Central American sun, Matteo stamped the wet snow off his boots—and (happily) not onto the shop’s restored wood-plank floor, thanks to my brilliant managerial decision to buy the multicultural Happy Holidays welcome mat.

  “You sound surprised to see me,” said my ex-husband, unzipping his Italian leather jacket.

  “True. I didn’t think you’d show.” I shut the door on the snowy night. “You only got back from Guatemala—what? Six hours ago?”

  “Five.”

  “And I know how you feel about Fa-la-la-la Lattes.” I smiled at the catchy term. I hadn’t invented it. Alfred Glockner, our local charity Santa, had coined it. In truth, the whole Taste of Christmas idea had been Alf’s.

  Matt shrugged. “What can I say? When it comes to coffee, I’m a purist.”

  As an international coffee broker as well as our coffee buyer, Matt was also a coffee snob, but justifiably so. The lattes and cappuccinos were a big draw to the Blend and a healthy contributor to our bottom line. But they weren’t his area of the business; they were mine—and my staff of baristas who mixed them to order.

  While I roasted and served the beans, Matt was responsible for sourcing them. And because harvest quality could change from season to season, Matt was essentially a java-centric Magellan, regularly exploring the world’s coffee belt—a band of mountainous slopes that circled the globe between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, where sunny, frost-free, moderately wet conditions allowed for the cultivation of the very best arabica beans.

  “Good thing your Holiday Blend’s a winner this year,” I said, knowing that our single-origin coffees, seasonal blends, and straight espressos were what lit Matt up. (No artificial oils, no sugar syrups, just his top-quality beans with natural, exotic spice notes, which I regularly roasted in small batches in our shop’s basement.)

  “So where’s Breanne?” I asked, glancing through the front door’s glass. Snow fluttered down through the light of the streetlamps, but the curb was empty. No limo. No hired car. No yellow cab with an open door sprouting an endless, designer-draped leg.

  “She was supposed to meet me here.” Matt scanned the tasting group gathered around the fire. “She hasn’t shown yet?”

  “No. Is she working late again?”

  Matt’s reply was a muttered, “When isn’t she?”

  “I’ll bet the snow held her up,” I said. “You know it’s murder getting a cab in weather like this.”

  Matt didn’t nod or agree, just pulled off his black knit cap, ran a hand over his short, dark Caesar, and looked away.

  He and Breanne had gotten married in the spring, went on a whirlwind tour of Spain for a number of weeks, then spent much of the summer in a cottony cloud of sweetness that rivaled Tucker’s Candy Cane Cappuccino. By early fall, however, the sugar had started to melt. Sharp bouts of bickering continually punctured their meringue of constant cooing.

  I didn’t see this as any great sign of marital doom. Sooner or later every honeymooning couple had to deal with the struggles and drudgery of workaday life. Whether they touched down or crash-landed, newlyweds have been
traveling the same trajectory for centuries.

  “Maybe you should call her?” I suggested.

  “Forget it,” he said, then changed the subject. “You know, Clare, our Holiday Blend’s a winner this year because of you. You created the blend; you perfected the roast.”

  “But you found the beans, Matt. Your beans are incredible.” I didn’t mind giving away the credit for this year’s exotically spiced blend. Usually, Matt was so cocky it wasn’t necessary. But because he’d gone humble on me, I stated the obvious: “That microlot of Sumatra you snagged on the last trip to Indonesia was superb. You made my job easy.”

  Matt’s weary expression lightened at that, and I was glad to see him smile—until his gaze drifted over me. In anticipation of the evening’s festivities, I’d fastened a prim choker of green velvet ribbon around my neck. In hopes of seeing Quinn, however, I’d squeezed into a new pair of not-so-prim, form-fitting low-riders. The holly-berry-colored cashmere-blend sweater wasn’t exactly loose, either. It also flaunted a borderline audacious neckline. (What could I say? I liked Quinn’s eyes on me.) Unfortunately, at the moment, it wasn’t Mike Quinn doing the looking.

  “Nice sweater,” Matt said with an arched eyebrow, and before I could stop him he reached out to brush the melting snow crystals from my hair. “Have I seen it before?”

  “The sweater’s new,” I informed him while carefully stepping beyond his reach.

  Married or not, Matteo Allegro liked women. And because I was one, there was no getting around his occasional flirtations. I could get around his touches, however, and I’d found that a subtle dodge worked a whole lot better than a snippy lecture—it proved a lot less embarrassing in public, too.

  Obviously, Matt and I had a history: the kind where you live together for ten years as man and wife. For various reasons—most of them having to do with his addictions to cocaine and women, not necessarily in that order—a single decade legally wedded to the man had been more than enough for me. We did, however, still share a grown daughter as well as another kind of commitment: Matt’s elderly mother owned this century-old coffeehouse and she’d bequeathed its future to the both of us. So once again Matt was my partner in business. I tried to keep that in mind whenever Matt’s penchant for crossing lines sprang up.

  Matt glanced around. “So where’s your guard dog?”

  “If you mean Mike, he’s got police business in the outer boroughs. He might not make it.”

  Matt’s dark eyebrows rose. “Too bad,” he said, but his tone didn’t sound disappointed. “Come on, I could use some warming up. The place looks great.”

  His arm began snaking around my hip-hugging jeans. I slipped clear.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You go ahead and hang up your wet coat in the back. I have to lock up again.”

  “I’ll save you a seat,” he said with a wink, then moved toward the back of the shop. As I turned to secure the door, however, it flew open on me.

  A runway-model-tall woman jarred me and our store’s new jingle bells without so much as a pardon me.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “We’re closed.”

  Even with half of her face mummified by a scarf the color of latte froth, I could tell the redhead was a knockout. In her midthirties, she had a stunning, statuesque figure. Peeking above the costly pashmina, her nose and cheekbones appeared daintily carved; her eyes adorably big and brilliantly blue. When I spoke to her, however, the woman’s wide, doll-like eyes collapsed into slits, squinting down at me as if she’d just noticed a bug under her boot.

  “Like hell you’re closed!”

  Okay, the woman’s tone was a tad nastier than the angelic face she showed to the world, but I forced a smile. For one thing, she was a new regular. I’d seen her in here several times over Thanksgiving weekend—wearing the same white fur-trimmed car coat and large sheepskin boots, both of which screamed designer label. Her hair was memorable, as well. From beneath her soft knit cap, her sleek curls tumbled down her shoulders in a silk stream of eye-catching scarlet, a striking contrast with the ivory car coat.

  “Again, I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said with polite firmness, “but we are clo—”

  “You are not,” she said, stamping her giant Ugg boot on my internationally festive welcome mat. “You have, like, a dozen people here!”

  Anyone who’d spent five minutes in Manhattan realized that a percentage of its well-heeled population sashayed around the island with so much attitude that branding entitlement on their foreheads would have been redundant. In the presence of perceived “peers,” these people could be downright charming. When dealing with no one of “significance”—say, a lowly coffeehouse manager—their behavior turned less than affable. As New York retail went, however, appallingly bad customer behavior wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, so I simply stiffened my spine.

  “I realize the snow’s really coming down. But I’m not lying to you. This is a private party, and we are closed as you can see from the sign on the door—”

  “Excuse me? Who, in their right mind, would notice some stupid little sign on a night like this?!”

  By now, the buzz of discussions near the fireplace had come to a dead stop. All eyes had turned to us, which wasn’t surprising. Everyone in the Big Apple loved a scene. Not that minding your own business wasn’t still a primary objective in this town, but there was an important distinction: Just because New Yorkers didn’t want to get involved in an unfolding drama didn’t mean they weren’t interested in gawking at it.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I offered. “If you don’t mind meeting and mingling with some new people, you can join our—”

  “Whatever!” she interrupted. “You’re closed!” Pirou etting like a girl who’d never missed a ballet recital, Red yanked open the door and stomped her big Ugg-booted feet out into the snowy night.

  I locked up and turned to find everyone still watching me. “Sorry about that.”

  “What do you have to be sorry about?!” Esther cried. “That woman was a total be-yotch!”

  Although I agreed with Esther, I wasn’t happy about ejecting anyone back out into a snowstorm. “I was trying to invite her to the party.”

  “Maybe if she hadn’t cut you off and pitched a fit,” Tucker said, “she would have heard the invitation! Talk about rude.”

  “The woman’s agitation level was off the charts,” Gardner said. “Looked to me like she needed her meds adjusted.”

  “O Valium, O Valium,” Tucker sang, “how lovely are your trances—”

  “That little display was nothing,” Dante said, waving a tattooed arm. “Three out of the last five nights I closed, I had to physically eject some total A-holes. It’s like the holiday season’s pissing everyone off.”

  “Yeah, me included,” Gardner confessed.

  “You?” I couldn’t believe my most reliably mellow barista had lost his holiday spirit. “Why?”

  “It’s these nonstop loops of mediocre Christmas tunes,” he said, gesturing to our shop’s speaker system. “At least three radio stations have been repeating these same lousy playlists twenty-four-seven for weeks now, and practically every store I walk into has one of them on speaker—”

  “It’s like bad sonic wallpaper,” Esther said.

  “Whatever you want to call it, it’s driving me sugarplum crazy.” Gardner shook his head. “Three weeks to December twenty-fifth and I’m already fed up with the sounds of the season.”

  “Me, too,” Dante said. “The CIA should abandon gangsta rap as a torture technique and try playing ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ a few hundred times in a row.”

  “Oh, man. One time’s enough for me,” said Theo, one of Gardner’s musician friends.

  “Wait!” Dante froze and pointed to the speaker system. “There it is again.”

  Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock . . .

  “Can we please cut the power on this stuff?” Theo begged.

  Gardner nodded and moved to turn off the 24/7 Christmas carol station.r />
  “But it’s a party,” I protested. “We should have music.” (And I actually liked “Jingle Bell Rock”—and “Winter Wonderland” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”—even if they were played twelve times in twenty-four hours.)

  “Put on my ambient mix,” Dante called to Gardner, then turned back to me.

  “That’s nice, mellow, latte-tasting music, don’t you think?”

  “But it’s not Christmasy,” I pointed out.

  “That’s okay by me,” said Banhi, Dante’s raven-haired roommate.

  “Yeah. Me, too,” added Kiki, the pierced platinum pixie.

  I couldn’t believe it. “Where’s your holiday spirit?”

  Everyone exchanged glances.

  Finally Dante said, “Face it, boss. There’s no holiday cheer out there because the holidays have become a grind. Everyone’s fed up with tinseled-up stores pushing commercial kitsch.”

  “Yeah, what’s good about gridlock season?” Kiki said. “Out-of-town tourists and bridge-and-tunnel bargain hunters swinging shopping bags like medieval maces? A herd of them nearly ran me over today rushing across Thirty-fourth!”

  “And don’t forget those corporate Scrooges all over the city,” Banhi added. “I temp at an office where all they do is gripe about having to use half of their bonuses to buy gifts for their families.”

  “Well, don’t talk to me about ‘holiday cheer’—” said Esther, putting air quotes around the offending phrase. “I’m still gagging over my perfect, older, married sister’s annual year-end newsletter about her perfect suburban life.”

  “I should have the Christmas spirit,” Tucker admitted. “Given my latest gig.”

  “What’s that?” asked one of the guys in Gardner’s group.

  “Dickie Celebratorio absolutely adored that limited-run cabaret I put together last summer, so he hired me to cast, direct, and choreograph his big holiday bash at the New York Public Library. We’ve been in rehearsal for two weeks now.”