Jennifer arrives at 1 PM with three canvas bags, a stepladder, and the kind of enthusiasm that makes my left eye twitch, which is never a good sign but is an especially bad sign when the bags appear to contain the entire inventory of a craft store.

"I brought supplies!"

"I can see that." I'm wiping down the counter, watching her unload streamers and balloons and a banner that says THANK YOU in letters large enough to be seen from space onto my largest table, along with a bag of something sparkly that I choose not to examine too closely. "Jennifer. What is all this?"

"Customer Appreciation Day!" She says it like I should have known, like we discussed this extensively, like I at any point agreed to transform my coffee shop into what appears to be a preschool birthday party. "I told you about this."

"You said 'we should do something fun for the regulars.' I thought you meant, like, a free cookie."

"Rena." She puts her hands on my shoulders, looks me dead in the eyes with the kind of intensity usually reserved for intervention speeches. "When have I ever meant 'a free cookie'?"

This is fair. Jennifer has never in her life meant "a free cookie."[^1]

The banner is the first casualty.

Jennifer's on her stepladder—which she insisted on bringing because apparently height equals success in the banner-hanging world—stretching to attach one end to the exposed beam while I hold the other end from a chair, and we're about thirty seconds into this operation when we both realize that neither of us thought about dimensions.

"It's too long," I say.

"It's not too long. The room is too short."

"Jennifer, that's not how—"

The command strip gives out. Her end drops. The banner swings toward me like a very slow, very festive wrecking ball, and I dodge it, which means I'm no longer holding my end either, which means the whole thing is now draped across three tables and a very startled man with a laptop who came here to work in peace and is now wearing the H and the A like a very specific scarf.

"We're having Customer Appreciation Day," Jennifer tells him brightly while I apologize seventeen times and try to extract thank-you letters from his keyboard. He leaves without ordering anything. He does not look appreciated.

The drink is the second casualty.

Jennifer had sent me a recipe for homemade pumpkin spice syrup last week—"so much better than store-bought, way more authentic"—and I followed it precisely, and what I have now is something that smells vaguely of autumn and looks like chunky orange paste.

"It'll smooth out when you mix it with the espresso," Jennifer says. "The heat will melt it."

It does not smooth out. The chunks refuse to integrate, the milk curdles around them in a way that shouldn't be physically possible, and the result looks like something from a science experiment about what happens when autumn attacks dairy. I pour it down the drain—once, twice, three times—each attempt worse than the last.[^2]

"Maybe we skip the signature drink," I say after attempt four produces something actively separating into layers.

"Or we try one more time and really believe in it."

"Jennifer, belief will not fix the curdling."

She's already measuring more paste into another cup.

The glitter is not a casualty. The glitter is a war crime.

I don't know who opened the bag, but somewhere between attempt five and Jennifer's second assault on the banner—now hanging crookedly but at least hanging—the bag of "festive sparkle" exploded. There is glitter on the counter, on the tables, on Betsy, in the knock box, which means every drink I make for the next six months will contain trace amounts of craft supplies.

"It's festive," Jennifer says weakly.

I'm sitting on the floor in front of the deep freeze—my spot, the place I go when everything's too much—covered in glitter, surrounded by pumpkin paste and fallen streamers, and something happens in my chest. I start laughing. I can't stop. It's not even funny—it's objectively a disaster, the banner says THAN YOU because the K folded under, Patricia's going to have a stroke—but the laughter keeps coming.

Jennifer slides down next to me. "This is bad."

"This is so bad."

"The banner looks good though."

I look at the banner—crooked, peeling, grammatically incomplete—and I mean it when I say: "It's perfect."

Patricia arrives at 3:15 and stops dead in the doorway.

"What happened here?"

"Customer Appreciation Day," I say, still finding glitter in places glitter should not be. "We appreciate you. Festively."

She looks at the banner, at the streamers drooping like sad party snakes, at the glitter coating everything. "I'll have my usual."

I make her usual—half-caf, oat milk, extra hot, light foam—with the same precision I always use, because Patricia's order is sacred even when the world is chaos. When I hand it to her, something sparkles on the surface of the foam.

She stares at the glitter. Stares at me. Takes a sip.

"It's... festive," she says, and takes her seat at the corner table like nothing is wrong, and I love her so much I could cry.

Walter comes in ten minutes later, surveys the chaos, and smiles his quiet smile. "Looks like you're having a day."

"We're appreciating customers," Jennifer calls from where she's trying to re-tape a streamer. "Aggressively."

"I feel appreciated." He orders his drip coffee, finds his usual table, draws his smiley face when he's done, same as always.

By 5 PM the banner has fallen twice more—we've stopped re-hanging it, just draped it over the book exchange shelf—and the pumpkin syrup has been permanently abandoned. I've swept glitter into a pile roughly the size of a small dog, and there's still more everywhere.

But the shop is full. Not packed, but full enough. Regulars at their usual spots, unbothered by the chaos. Jennifer at the counter, finally sitting still, drinking a latte with absolutely no pumpkin anywhere near it.

"This was a disaster," she says.

"Total disaster."

"We should do it again next year."

"Absolutely not."

She grins. I grin back. And somewhere in my chest, underneath the exhaustion and the sparkle, something settles into place.

The joy of the Lord is your strength. The verse surfaces unbidden, and I finally understand it. Not happiness when everything goes right—that's easy. But this: laughing on the floor of a disaster. Finding the celebration in the mess. Letting people see you fail spectacularly and showing up anyway.

That's joy. The kind you choose. The kind that doesn't need perfection.

Jennifer reaches over and picks glitter out of my hair, then gives up because there's too much.

"You've got a little..."

"I know." I look around—crooked banner, sparkly everything, Patricia at the corner table, Walter's smiley face drying in his mug. "It's everywhere."

And for once, that's exactly right.

[^1]: Jennifer's version of "low-key" involves at minimum three bags of supplies and structural modifications.

[^2]: Belief did not fix the curdling. For the record.