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I might have known that Judith and Judas sounded too much alike when my childhood friend got too interested in how I had successfully extended my coffee shop hours into happy hour.
Judith made her living at the time as a social media influencer. She made ten times as much money as me at that point in her career, and I knew that she and our old friends looked down on me for staying with the coffee shop my siblings and I had inherited from our father.
What I did not realize was how much Judith and some other friends hated me for what came with my humble legacy: the love and loyalty of real people who had known my family for generations.
So, I was devastated when my elder brother Tarik sat me down and showed me Judith presenting a new recipe and product to her followers: the Arabica Mocha Cocktail, the alcoholic version of the very thing I had used to extend my shop's relevancy into happy hour.
“I've been trying to warn you,” he said. “Judith hates you and everything about you, and this is how she is acting out.”
My heart broke, but my mind stayed functional.
“She's not even doing it right,” I said. “She's missing the secret ingredient.”
“But what are we going to do about it – her reach is so big that we will never be able to catch up with her publicity!” my sister Khati said.
“Well, the patent is pending,” I said, “but in the meantime, I need a day or so to process this.”
I went home and cried, a lot – I had known Judith thirty years and she had sold me out for thirty thousand or so pieces of silver. Worse than that were my so-called friends over on her social media talking about “You Go Girl!”
But then I saw Griselda over there stunting, and I realized she had forgotten something about herself that I remembered.
The next day I put up a post and tagged Griselda and the rest in it: “It's good to know who people really are and what they are about – but when you find out, make them stay in the bed they have made.”
Then I blocked them all off my page, and waited.
For people who thought they were better than and had gotten one over on me, Judith, Griselda, and the rest certainly were mad when I cut them off, mad enough to make the mistakes I knew they would. I enjoyed going on their pages and watching them use what they understood of my recipe to make their cocktails and lead Judith's followers to do the same, to great fanfare and excess.
The next day, Griselda was in intensive care, and over the course of the next week, many of Judith's followers became ill, some seriously.
In the middle of the firestorm, I added the most popular tags that had come out of the incident to a video of me, timestamped years before Judith, making the Arabica Mocha Mocktail as it should be made, along with the patent pending information and a simple statement.
“First of all, Judith Escarole stole this recipe from me, and when you steal things you don't get to fully understand how they are made. Her perversion of my stuff uses far too much alcohol, and doesn't include the secret ingredient, which we'll just call LHK for the purpose of keeping it secret. So, y'all can keep getting sick, or come on down to Kofi's Coffee Shop for happy hour and have me make the Arabica Mocha Mocktail as it should be made.”
To make a long story short: Judith's career as a social media influencer was succeeded by her career as a perpetually losing civil litigant. It was a good thing she had made all that money over the years. She needed it to keep from ending up homeless. Meanwhile, Tarik and Khati each opened up new locations for Kofi's Coffee Shop to meet the new demand, and the family business continues to thrive to this day.
“But how did you turn it all back on them?” Khati asked me.
“And what is this secret ingredient?” Tarik said. “I've watched you make that mocktail a thousand times and I can't figure it out, sis!”
“Griselda is allergic to coffee, but she was so busy stunting and fronting that I knew that if I ticked all my so-called friends off, she would tip back the cocktail with the rest of them – and all of them would end up doing too much and leading Judith's followers to drink too much. This mocktail uses liqueurs only as flavoring agents, not alcohol as a main base – but of course, Judith didn't get that right.”
“That couldn't have tasted great, what she was doing,” Khati said, shaking her head.
“Of course not,” I said. “She mixed all that arabica dark roast, cocoa, chaga, ganoderma, and kava with too much hard alcohol, not enough mineral water, and absolutely no LHK.”
“But what is LHK?” my siblings demanded.
“What did Dad always say we were to do all things with?”
Khati fell out laughing as Tarik repeated Dad's favorite phrase: “Do all things with love, honesty, and kindness.”
“And Judith,” I said, “knew us for thirty years, missed the secret ingredient, and paid the price.”