When the server arrives with our drinks and food, I take a sip of my cocktail as an excuse to watch Marigold over the rim of the glass. It’s hard to keep my eyes off her. Something about the holidays brings out a glow underneath her skin. She looks sacred somehow, like a saint—although I’m not entirely sure Jews have saints. Doesn’t matter.
She looks holy.
Marigold tears a piece off one of the powdered sugar–dustedsufganiyotand eats it. The way she licks the sugar off her fingers after does something indecent to me, and I shift in my chair, crossing and uncrossing my legs.
“What do you think?” she asks, gesturing toward my cocktail and the latke on my plate, already half-eaten.
“I’m thinking this place should stay open year-round. Who says we can’t have festive Hanukkah vibes in July?”
She laughs, and I notice a little smear of powdered sugar on the corner of her lips. It only makes her more endearing. “I mean,yeah. You’re not wrong.” She points down at my plate again. “So? Did you decide? Team applesauce or team sour cream?”
“Team both,” I decide. “Especially at the same time. Gotta get that sweetnessandthe tanginess. Why divide ourselves when we can truly have it all?”
“Right answer,” Marigold says. She reaches across the table to stab her fork into my latke, finishing it off. “But you have to eat fast. They’re not very good when they’re cold.”
We spend the next hour there, finishing our drinks—then second drinks—and the whole time, I keep thinking…I could do this forever. I could actually, literally, do this forever: our knees bumping companionably beneath the table, the sugar on Marigold’s cheek, the way she looks when she laughs. The color of her hair in this light, like burnt gold. The taste of applesauce on my tongue and the candles burning down to stubs.
And maybe I can,I think.
Maybe this doesn’t have to end.
19
Marigold
But end it does. Because something changes on the walk home, a shift in the energy between us. Something’s on Jamie’s mind—it’s a palpable presence between us the entire walk home, even if he plays along on script for every conversation I try to rope him into. More than anything, it reminds me of the way things used to be between us. Like he’s trying so damn hard to be civil while nursing a hot coal of hatred in his heart, fiercely and devotedly keeping it warm.
I manage not to say anything until we’re back in the apartment and I’m watching Jamie shuck off his flannel overshirt with rough hands like it did something to personally offend him.
“What’s up?” I try to phrase it lightly, to give him every opportunity to come up with an equally light and self-deprecating excuse.
“Nothing,” he says, in the kind of voice that makes it obvious it isn’t nothing.
“Okay,” I say.
He toes off his shoes, also too brusquely. He wants me to ask again. So, obviously, now I’m determined to pretend I believe him, because stupid games are stupid.
“I’m making tea,” I announce. “Do you want some?”
“I’m good.”
Jamie follows me all the way into the kitchen anyway, a seething and extremely hard-to-ignore ball of black energy. He manages to restrain himself all the way up until I’ve boiled the water and started pouring it over my tea leaves.
“So. You know Ruoxi Zhang, huh?”
Aaaand there it is. I should have guessed.
“Ah, right. That old chestnut.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” he bites out.
I put down the kettle and meet his gaze across the kitchen counter. “Weren’t we supposed to be getting past this? I thought we weren’t going to fight about my family background anymore.”
“Really? I don’t remember agreeing to that.”
“Oh, okay, so you’ve just been secretly stewing on this the whole time after all. You’re really good at faking civility, then.”
His mouth twists. “Fakingcivility? For one, I haven’t been faking anything. Second…civility? Seriously? That’s the word we’re going with?”
