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“Everyone gather ‘round!”
He looks up from his book to see Nile grinning from the kitchen door.
“C’mon, it’s time for the big reveal!” she says with big encouraging waves of her arm to the living room at large.
It’s so goyish, and so American, to make such a big deal of Hanukkah. It’s the kind of thing that feels a little weird, sort of... objectifying when people do it because they think making a big deal of Hanukkah somehow proves they’re, as Nile would put it, “inclusive or not antisemitic or whatever.”
This Hanukkahsplosion of hers is none of that. It’s a pure gesture of her love. Her enthusiasm to learn about him and all of them and their histories and cultures and languages, her way of diving head-first into new things and forging a path for herself as she goes — it’s breathtaking. This isn’t the first time she’s created a new tradition for their little family, not even the first time she’s done such a thing especially for him.
He loves her so fucking much.
All week they’ve been eating all manner of fried things she’s been testing out for this. All month, really. That and lots of salads, because they may be immortal but it still doesn’t feel great to go too long without eating a vegetable. And every night of the holiday Nile solemnly brings out a menorah she welded herself for the occasion, a gift to him for the first night and their first Hanukkah officially as a couple.
Now it’s the eighth night and this feast she’s been planning is covering every possible surface in the very generously sized kitchen in their house in Recife.
“Ok! We’ve got latkes of course, with sour cream and applesauce and ketchup and a few French cheeses I thought might be interesting to try with them.” She gestures proudly to this corner of the spread, which looks like it includes Picodon.
Had he told her about that? It was the first thing he ever stole, a wheel of Picodon when he was twelve, because his mother loved it so much.
“If you want some sugar to start the party, sufganiyot for my little sufganiyot,” Nile says, punctuated with a quick kiss on his shoulder. “There’s a bunch more desserts we’ll be frying up fresh later so that y’all don’t go eating all of them first and spoil your dinner.”
“Fried fish, both a pan-fried version and the classic soul food breaded kind, complete with hush puppies. Classic coxinhas with chicken, beef and veggie empanadas, chiles rellenos full to the gills with cheese, toasted ravioli also full of cheese, corn dogs, tostones, kuli-kuli, and that’s brik Joe is taking off the stove now. It’s a lot of food, and if you’re worried about anything getting cold before you make room for it, start with the brik. I’m personally very excited about pairing it with the latkes.”
Joe brings a platter of beautifully fried triangles to the table with a flourish. “I was told to warn anyone who wants to still look sexy by the end of the night that biting into one of these as if it’s finger food will cause egg yolk to drip all over your shirt,” he says.
Booker wants to hear the story that prompted this warning and the smirk that came with it, but first he wants to eat everything.
“Load up your plates,” Nile says, “then head back into the living room for menorah lighting!”
He does as he’s told, and as he settles on one of the couches with an enormous plate of food, Nicky hands him a beer from the very full tub of iced-down bottles he’s just carried in. Andy and Joe are bringing in some of the serving platters so they’re handy for seconds, and Quynh has just turned from putting down her own plate to start distributing candles and matches to all the menorahs someone must have set up around the room while he wasn’t looking.
There are more menorahs here than there are people to light them. It makes him twinge for his family, but it soothes the ache knowing that Nile must’ve meant this as a gesture to honor those who can’t be here to light candles with them. She understands how it hurts him more to forget than it does to remember.
The menorah she made looks stunning in a place of honor by the window where it’s twinkling with the haze of a midsummer sunset. He looks around at each of them and gets a little lost in where they all came from. How long has Nile been planning this? Some of these menorahs have been in deep storage in safehouses very, very far away from where they’ve all been living together full-time for months now. He knows for a fact that the little menorah he stole from the Vatican archives was still in their hideout near Seoul just last year, but here it is standing proud on their mantel in Brazil.
He’s just taken his first bite of this absolutely gorgeous fried fish when he spots the person responsible for tonight coming down the stairs. There she is, Nile Freeman, his heart’s match of this lifetime and he hopes many more to come, resplendent in cutoff shorts, a simple tank top, and the lacy summer-weight Hanukkah sweater he made her.
Another big day of planning the Hanukkah party checked off the list, Nile thinks to herself with satisfaction as she finishes washing her face.
The other day while she was out shopping she had a moment of panic about whether it’s ok to spell it like that. She’s seen it a few different ways and it might not be a big deal but then again it might and she just wants this all to go well.
“hey babe, have I been spelling Hanukkah wrong?”
“it's spelled חֲנֻכָּה so you're fine”
Oh of course, she thought. Duh. Before she could have any more anxiety about it, though, she got a few more texts.
“you’re also gorgeous
and smart
and wonderfully ridiculous for making such a big deal of this
I love you”
He really does. And she sure does love him too.
It’s mostly been so much fun doing all the research and planning for this. Reading up on different Hanukkah traditions, looking up recipes, thinking about foods from her childhood and Brazilian foods and other not specifically Jewish foods that she could fry up to include, asking the others for help, sourcing ingredients, testing recipes, eating lots of fried things as she plans the menu— yeah, it’s mostly been great fun.
One big exception is how she had to cross fried chicken off the draft menu. Maybe someday she can try to recreate her granddad’s recipe. Someday. Maybe.
Another is how bleak so much Jewish history is. It seems like every single Wikipedia entry about “the history of Jews in X” is full of violent antisemitism. There were a few decades in the 1600s when Recife had a thriving Jewish community because the Dutch were the colonizers controlling the area, a brief respite in more than 300 years of the Inquisition in South America. The church’s punishment for the crime of Jewishness was burning at the stake.
Today Nicky took her aside and explained to her about a tradition he started a few decades after Booker joined them: whenever they’re together at Hanukkah, he sings Maoz Tzur. He was talking in his usual Nicky way where his voice sounds all calm and lilting but there’s that seriousness underneath. At first she thought, naively, oh what a nice gesture, a pretty song.
Turns out this song is like the big hymn for the holiday, and it was written in the Middle Ages in part to commemorate all the Jews who were murdered by Crusaders on their march to the Holy Land. Fuck.
She and Nicky joke sometimes about how their friendship is like Invaders Anonymous. It’s basically the only thing she can say out loud in the direction of acknowledging that she knowingly enlisted to fight in the wrong side of a war that should never have happened. Just like making her granddad’s fried chicken, anything more than that is gonna take a hell of a lot more time before her grief is less overwhelming. Nicky’s usually pretty careful not to push her on that, and she still doesn’t know what the fuck happened between him and Joe to get them from their first meeting to this but she assumes the way Nicky’s gentle with her comes from hard experience.
He pushed a little bit today, though. What it means to be a Christian who loves a Muslim, or in this case a Jew, is something he’s thought a lot about and he told her some things she’s gonna be thinking about for a long time. He told her a few things she really didn’t like hearing but probably needed to. Some things seemed well-meaning but worth talking to Booker about instead of simply taking Nicky’s word for it.
A few of the things Nicky said were, to be polite about it, not applicable to her situation. He and Andy, and sometimes Joe too, don’t always get how pervasively racism affects her life or how long a shadow it casts over the world. Sometimes she has the energy to explain and sometimes she doesn’t, and today she didn’t particularly feel like pointing out to Nicky that when she was reading about Brazilian Jewish history, she came across casual references to some Jews being reported to the Inquisition by their slaves. Because Jews were brutalized by the church, but they were also allowed to own and brutalize other human beings, people who were considered acceptable to brutalize because they looked like her. That shit is personal for her, and how Nicky was talking, it’s like he doesn’t know that.
Nile is so grateful to her ancestors who took the religion their enslavers forced onto them and built out of it the AME tradition that’s been her rock though so much trauma and bullshit. The Romans probably didn’t make Jesus super optional for Nicky’s ancestors either, but that context is different. She’s heard some weird things about Jewish people growing up, and she really did need to hear some of what Nicky told her, but... yeah.
Anyway. Christianity and its sins, all the layers of the world and how history weighs differently on each of them, it’s a lot to think about. She took an extra-long run to clear her head before she could get on with her day of recipe testing, and as her feet hit the pavement she thought about the vague but powerful connection she felt with Booker so early on, and how reading about the history around Jewish cuisine makes her ache for soul food.
Speaking of cuisine, she thinks wryly as she throws in the trash the piece of floss she just used. That wonderful recipe for cheese and onion bourekas is off the menu because although nigella seeds absolutely make the dish, damn did they get stuck in her teeth. Not cute. This party is gonna be an explosion of fried foods, but she still plans on looking sexy by the end of the night.
And speaking of looking sexy, Booker has just appeared in the bathroom door.
He stands there a moment just looking at her. She loves how open he is with his appreciation. The looks of earnest fondness, the admiration in his eyes when she’s said or done something badass, the outright leering, she loves it all. Tonight he seems—
Mmm. All of a sudden he’s right behind her, planting a lingering kiss on the nape of her neck just below her bonnet. God, yes she thinks, and she’s about to turn around and kiss him for real when she remembers she’s still got a mouth full of toothpaste.
Immortality covers growing back any lost teeth, but bad breath still isn’t cute, so ok fine, she will finish brushing her teeth before getting her mouth on him. While she’s being a grownup about it and not pouting at all, he kisses the back of her neck some more, along her shoulder, it feels so good...
All of a sudden his kisses are gone, and in their place there’s a tape measure?
She’s got to admit he’s cute as hell with this look of casual concentration on his face as he measures the span of her shoulders, the length of her arm, a loose circle around the base of her neck like a collar.
“Whatcha up to there?” she asks, and he just hums as he continues on his merry way across her torso. “Hang on, I’ve gotta,” is enough warning for him to pull back so she can spit and rinse her mouth, then once she’s upright again, it’s back to the tape measure.
Mmm, hello there, she thinks as he wraps the tape around her where her tits are fullest. She arches her back into his touch.
Booker huffs against the side of her neck. “Stand up straight for me just another moment, please?”
His tone is casual, but when she catches his eyes in the mirror they’re hungry. She smirks at him.
“I will if you tell me what this is all about.”
His hands are moving fast. She wishes he’d go faster so he can be done already and get his hands on her for real.
“I’m knitting you a sweater to wear to this Hanukkah explosion you’re planning.”
Ok, that’s the cutest damn thing. A sweater, like for an ugly Christmas sweater party, because she’s a silly American, even though it’s a million degrees and very much not sweater weather here in also-America, y’know, that continent or two that the USA doesn’t have sole dominion of.
She’s pulled out of her thoughts by Booker’s tape measure landing just under the swell of her ass.
“All done,” he says breezily, and thank God, because she has been patient for long enough.
When he sets down the tape measure on the bathroom counter, she grabs his hand and holds it against the swell of her hip, where the hem of her sleep shirt meets her bare thigh. That’s all the encouragement he needs to get both his hands under her shirt and his mouth back on her neck where it belongs.
“I love you,” she murmurs as she grinds her ass back against him.
He’s never had latkes with Picodon before, seeing as how he’s much older than latkes and has mostly only ever eaten them in the US. This latke with its slice of Picodon has been sitting on his plate for a little while now, not long enough to get cold, just nice and melty. His first taste confirms what he already knew: once again Nile is right. This is delicious.
Everything is delicious.
Quynh is continuing her love affair with ketchup by squirting generous ribbons of it across her umpteenth plate of seconds. Andy has just constructed another latke and fish sandwich with generous dabs of both sour cream and hot sauce. There’s giggling coming from the kitchen, which probably means either Joe or Nicky has attempted to fellate a corn dog, and he can’t say he blames them. There’s a reason he wasn’t invited yesterday afternoon when Nile filled the sufganiyot with all this tart-sweet jelly that squishes out just a little with every perfect bite.
The first time she’d called him her little sufganiyot, somehow teasing her about how that’s plural turned into teasing about whether Boston cream pie donuts would be on the menu, which then turned into other things best not to think about right now. Not if he doesn’t want to distract her from the remaining segments of this party for which she has made an agenda.
She’s so fucking sexy in that sweater. The hem grazes her bare thighs just below the fraying edges of her tiny little shorts, and the open design of the knit allows tantalizing peeks at her skin glistening from the humidity.
“Booker, are you with us?” Andy says. She’s waving her latke sandwich in his face to get his attention.
He aims for casual with, “Oh, I’m here, just enjoying everything. What were you saying?”
“Uh huh,” Nile mutters in his ear before kissing his cheek and getting up to walk to the kitchen with an extra sway of her hips. She’s got his number alright.
“If you’re done staring,” says Quynh affectionately, “we were saying it’s time for the competition to begin.”
By the time Nile returns with an unsullied corn dog — reheated, as she insists it’s traditional to let them get cold and then microwave them — Joe and Nicky are following in her wake, and Quynh and Andy are playing up stretching as if to warm up for feats of athleticism.
Nile nestles in by his side and they both take a long moment just to enjoy the closeness.
“Hey!” says Joe from his half of the enormous overstuffed armchair. “You said it was time for the mysterious competition portion of the evening!”
“The competition,” Nile says, slowly, dramatically. “It is indeed time. This evening we will discover, once and for all, who among us...”
Andy throws a hush puppy at her for stalling. Nile catches it just to show she can, then she takes a nice big bite, chews it, swallows, licks her lips. “Who among us,” she finally says, “can come up with the most names of fried foods.”
Oh what a cacophony of joyful nonsense ensues.
Within minutes Nile is already accusing them of making up words, and while he’s personally familiar with at least five of the variations on sambousek that their little mishmash mishpacha rattle off, some of those claimed spellings and pronunciations seem like an attempt by the olds to get one over on the youth. He’d point out the inherent ridiculousness of trying to keep score in a competition where some valid answers predate written language, but it’s not about who wins, it’s about the affectionate yelling.
They run out of cold beer amid a long run of shouting names of different fritters, and he offers to help restock but Nile insists he stay on the couch and continue the game while she and Nicky take care of it. There’s a million different kinds of pakoras alone, and onion pakoras are essentially latkes with a little different outside coating, and they’re so good, and that reminds Andy of...
By the time Nile is back by his side — with a can of seltzer for each of them; she’s so smart — they’ve moved on to the wide world of falafels.
“At the risk of reminding myself of eretz Yisrael,” he says, “sabich is a perfect food. Nile, you’d love it. Eggplant fried to this magic texture no amount of poetry can describe, stuffed in a pita with fries and Arabic salad and tahini and—”
Nile gives him a gentle hand squeeze before shouting to the room at large, “Oh! French fries! I can’t believe I forgot about like the very most basic fried food.”
She launches into a long discussion of the comparative merits of different shapes of fries, knowing it will draw the others’ attention and give him some space. There’s so much about Israeli food that feels like home for him, from his own childhood and from a few lifetimes of cooking and traveling with Andy and Joe and Nicky. But it also tastes like what Zionism could have been, and so it reminds him of the heartbreak of all the needless violence it’s become.
Once he’s tucked that tender part of him away again, he finds himself simultaneously treated and cursed with his family having a spirited debate about the deep-fried abominations of US state fairs.
“Is fried pizza not simply a calzone?” Nicky asks. Booker’s not sure whether he’s indulging Nile or genuinely confused on this one, and to be honest he’s not sure about the difference either.
Nile laughs. “No, it’s a regular slice of thin crust pizza, cheese out and everything, that’s dredged and deep-fried. Like chicken-fried steak but it’s pizza.”
“I’m not sure I understand what chicken-fried steak means,” Quynh says, “but I very much want to try it.”
Booker knows exactly why they’re not eating fried chicken tonight. He’s about to redirect her from the topic when Andy beats him to it with a quick promise to take her to a diner sometime for an authentic cheesy USA-themed date night.
The conversation moves on to how Nile’s country for better or for worse turned all Chinese cuisine into fried food. Someone claims egg rolls are sacred and to be praised at every opportunity — which is true, even bad egg rolls are great — but it reminds Joe of something he claims Andy or Quynh told him about the old days, which in turn sounds like another instance of their elders seeing what bullshit they can get away with, and therefore it becomes an extended and detailed and very funny argument.
“Oh, duh, chimichangas!” Nile says, because she makes what feels to him like highly improbable leaps with great ease, just like Joe always has. “And flautas and taquitos and— hey, look, I’m doing that annoying thing y’all do where you keep listing different names for the same thing.”
“Ooh, that reminds me,” comes, naturally, from Joe. “When we were thinking about jalapeño poppers for tonight’s menu as part of the Tex-Mex offerings, I kept forgetting to tell you about basically a Filipino hybrid between those and spring rolls. Dynamite lumpia. Andy, do you remember that one job in, what was it, ‘03?”
“I do now,” Andy says with a grin. “Nile, they are, in fact, dynamite.”
“Ok that was cheesy.” Nile’s narrowing her eyes at Andy but she looks delighted.
“They are!” shouts Joe.
This veers off into an examination of which cheeses are sturdy enough to hold up to frying, which of course depends greatly on what kind of frying one means.
“Hang on,” says Quynh. “If in this competition of naming fried foods we’re counting latkes, which I saw with my own two eyes hold together best if they’re not fully submerged, but we’re not counting, for example, scrambled eggs...”
Andy shouts, “Oh yeah! Scrambled eggs!” to a round of laughter and booing from across the room.
“It’s my party, which I’m hosting for Booker, so I say he gets to decide. Whatta ya say, babe?”
“Oh, I see, trying to make the Jew the bad guy,” Booker says with a teasing smile, meaning it as a joke.
The moment it’s out of his mouth, though, the room goes tense. Nile’s eyes are wide and he can tell she’s holding her breath.
He could just say he was joking, or he could double down and make an even darker joke so the first one’s funnier by comparison. It’s been, hmm, a decade or so since all the mess with Merrick happened. Long enough that they’ve all started to joke about it here and there.
So he reaches over to give Nile’s hand a squeeze for reassurance and says, “What, are you worried about the optics of it being the Jewish one among us who most recently made a shitty decision and hurt the others?”
The tension eases with their laughter, but Nile still looks pretty damn unsure.
“Did you give her a big speech or something?” he asks Nicky, and the look on his face tells Booker that’s exactly what happened. He loves Nicky, he really does, but Jesus, he would really appreciate it if people full of Catholic guilt wouldn’t go around making it other people’s problem.
He would really like to get them all squarely back in the party mood from a few minutes ago. Nile worked so hard on this party and he’s been having such a good time so far. Perhaps one more joke will do it.
“Well, you all seem to have forgotten for a moment that I’m also French, which makes me excellent as both a judge of cooking and a target for, hmm, punching up? My official decree is it counts if it requires more oil than would be acceptable in a sauté.”
Joe immediately starts pestering him with edge cases, then Nile piles on with a detailed explanation of how a Crunchwrap Supreme is usually pan-fried but it would be better if first quickly pan-fried to seal and then deep-fried for flavor and crispiness, and they’re back to a cacophony of joyful nonsense.
They’re all back in the kitchen, huddled around the stove and its crowded array of the deepest cast iron pans they could rustle up for the occasion, for another delightful stage in Nile’s agenda for this party.
She’d solemnly distributed aprons to each of them as she herded them all from their cozy lounging spots in the living room. What finally got Quynh out of her blanket nest on the floor was a loving description of all the desserts they were about to make.
Only the sufganiyot and lokma could be made ahead of time, Nile had said. The other six desserts need to be made fresh. Nicky has been assigned fried oreos because Nile thought it would be fun to torture him, and he’s playing along nicely, lightly feigning offense at the magic of cheap, shelf-stable treats. The remainder are a handful of the thousands of variations on simple fried dough.
Booker is in charge of the bolinhos de chuva. He’s being careful to give them their raindrop shapes as he dollops the batter into the oil. They’re pretty, which is reward enough, but then Nile looks over at his pan with approval and his skin tingles. He can’t help it, he’s got a praise kink.
Nile is making an enormous funnel cake, deep and twisty and spanning the entirety of their largest cast iron. It’s a deceptively simple process: just make a big mess of the batter, but somehow do so evenly, and then pick the right moment to flip it over with enough finesse that they don’t lose their lease deposit on oil damages. She loves deceptively simple challenges as well as the obviously hard ones, and her attempt at this one looks to be going well so far.
Around them the others are hard at work frying yet more dough shapes. Nile had prepped all the doughs earlier in the day, labeling them with their particular instructions, so that this would be a fun and limited-chaos activity even this deep into the party. She planned so much for all of this.
Joe has cut the beignets into precise little squares that he bets are scheduled to be covered in powdered sugar New Orleans-style, the quẩy are turning out so elegant with Quynh’s careful twists, and Andy is using a cookie scoop to make precise rounds of the puff-puffs. There’s mashed plantain in the puff-puff batter but the only visual distinction between those and the bolinhos de chuva will be the slightly different shapes, making his careful teardrops extra important.
It all smells amazing. As their finished creations get transferred from oven-side trays lined with paper towels to serving platters, Nile gives each kind of fried dough its own special topping. The combined aesthetic effect is really something special.
When he takes off his apron, he realizes he must’ve gotten a little sweaty over by the stove; his shirt is clinging skin-tight. Should he change into something clean before they all go outside for whatever Nile’s got planned next?
Absolutely not, he thinks as he notices Nile staring at his chest. If anything he should just take his shirt off entirely. If that wouldn’t derail her plans of course.
“Geez, Book, you can’t just whip your tits out like that!” Andy shouts at him. “Nile almost dropped the sfongoi, which she thinks she’s been hiding from me since she made them two days ago but she is very wrong about!”
Nile looks away from his tits to examine the masking tape she’d applied all around the large ceramic bowl she’s just taken out of the fridge, presumably for signs that the plastic wrap has been tampered with. He’s certain Andy would leave no trace of her theft, and as much as he misses the feel of Nile’s gaze on him, the way she glares at Andy is so cute.
“Wait, sfongoi?” Nile says. “Is that the word you couldn’t remember the other day?”
Andy and Nile banter at each other about linguistics and thieving as they head outside, pausing only for Nile to insist he sit down and relax while they go set up some mysterious final stage of the party.
Quynh sits down next to him and offers to carve up an oreo to sample while their bosses are away.
Joe waggles his eyebrows at them as he takes a piece of oreo. “Bosses of all of us, or the two of you specifically?”
“Both is good,” says Quynh, and he really, really agrees.
“One of the things I love most about Hanukkah,” Nile says, “is how you never light just one candle. Every night of the holiday gets its own candle and its own moment in the spotlight, and there’s the helper candle that comes in every night to get the party started and light the rest.”
There’s a little powdered sugar on her chin as she stands in front of them to give this little speech. It’s got to be close to midnight by now, and the air is still so nice and warm. He’s cozy and well-fed and surrounded by people who love him, and Nile is speaking so earnestly about what sharing in some of his heritage means to her while looking so beautiful in that sweater he made her.
“I don’t even know how many candles we lit in there earlier — that’s a lie, there were 162.” They all laugh, because they’d all seen the planning charts. “But anyway, it’s easy to feel the light when there’s a full menorah on the eighth night. On the first night, that’s when you really lean on the shamash. It matters most when you’re just one candle all alone and you don’t know about all the light that’s coming in your future. That’s when you really need a sad dilf to offer you a change of clothes.”
What a way to put that. God, he loves her.
“The solstice was a few days ago, which on this side of the planet means the days have started to get shorter, and I had a point I wanted to make about that but I can’t remember it right now. I just love y’all and especially I love you, Book. Thanks for letting me throw you this party.”
Booker blows her a kiss. He watches as she catches it, mimes petting it as if it were a small rodent friend in the palm of her hand, and then presses it to her heart. He’s so damn lucky.
“What Andy’s about to help me unveil is the last thing on the menu for tonight. Oh, right! As the days get shorter! It’s the last night of Hanukkah, and it won’t be summer for all that much longer, but they’ll both come around again. And even when things get really bad, we have ways of making our own light.”
Nile walks up to him with a candle. “Light this for me?” she asks, and when a quick pat-down of his pockets reveals he doesn’t have a lighter on him, Joe hands him one. Before he can flick it open, Nile tells him to wait, and leans in for a kiss.
She tastes like powdered sugar and the good kind of survival. He might cry.
He lights her little candle, and after a moment of just looking at each other with the help of its glow, she turns around, shouts, “Hey Andy, catch!” and throws—
Fireworks light up the sky. A glittering circle of blue and eight of bright white.
Nile reveals she didn’t really try to throw a lit candle halfway across their backyard, and she uses it to light a second candle that’s appeared on the table next to them while he wasn’t paying attention, nestled in the first-night place on Nile’s handmade menorah. She hands the shamash to Joe and Nicky, who add candles to the remaining places on the menorah and light them up for a full eighth-night glow.
Andy and Quynh laugh in the distance as more fireworks sail up into the darkness and explode in so many shapes and colors.
Booker cuddles Nile close and leans back to watch the show.
