“Thanks for keeping Chili for a while,” I say. “I don’t think he’d eat everything in the bakery if I took him there, but I also didn’t think he’d chase a squirrel. Ever. So I’m not taking any chances.”
“Have you met Amanda’s family yet?”
“Nope. You all got the honor of both of us first.”
Huh.
That lovely eggnog-iced-gingerbread flavor doesn’t taste so good when I’m lying to my sister. Not that I’m lying about Amanda meeting our family first.
More that I’m lying about us being in a relationship at all.
Lorelei gives me one last long eyebrow-arched look. “Don’t fuck this up.”
“She wouldn’t have said yes if she didn’t mean it.”
That part, at least, is true.
I give Lorelei a quick hug. Not too long—the morning’s already steamy hot—but hard enough that she should know I don’t want to fuck anything up.
That I don’t want to cause her any pain.
“Grandma and Grandpa are convinced that Vicki Anderson’s timing her anniversary party with their anniversary party to steal their thunder,” Lorelei murmurs to me.
“I’m aware.”
“Just saying. I have no idea what you’re walking into on the other side.”
“Have you ever heard the real reason our families hate each other?” I ask her.
“They sometimes talk about the fit the Andersons threw the year Grandpa made a fruitcake house and won the gingerbread house contest, but just like you, I have no idea why they’d been fighting for the decades before that.”
The fruitcake house happened before Lorelei and I were born.
I’ve seen faded pictures, though.
It was epic. A glorious monstrosity. No idea how the whole thing held together, but it will be family legend for generations to come still.
Pretty sure it won for the mere fact that it was outlandish and shouldn’t have made it to the contest at all.
And we can’t talk about how epic it was without also talking about how glad we are that it made the Andersons furious.
Is it possible to have been born the wrong species? I’d rather be a dog.
I rub Chili’s fur once more, then head around the building and across the street.
The Gingerbread House looks exactly as you’d expect. The plastered exterior walls are painted to look like a gingerbread house with candy canes “growing” among the poinsettias in the flower boxes beneath the picture windows flanking the door. Surfer nutcrackers stand guard too. The angled roof has bright-white globs of frosting dripping over the edges. Painted fiberglass, I’m sure. Large, multicolored holiday bulbs line the roofline, real lights intermixed with painted fiberglass bulbs so that it looks lit up, even in the daytime.
The building itself is a work of art.
Grandpa tried to make the Fruitcake Emporium just as quaintly themed for a few years there. One year he painted cherries on the windows that looked like giant bloody butts. Another year, he tried raisins.
Don’t ask what people said about that. Just don’t.
He finally conceded that there’s not a lot you can do to compete with a real-life gingerbread house, so instead, he replaces the red-and-green awnings as soon as there’s a hint of fading, he keeps the windows spotless, and he and Grandma go overboard with even more poinsettias and shaped rosemary bushes and Christmas cacti in their flower boxes.
Plus the red bench with a fiberglass Santa for anyone to sit next to and take pictures with all year round.
Get that free advertising with the store name right behind them,he says.
