Page 11 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“Oh, Grandma,” Elizabeth said. “What did you say to him?”

“He came to withdraw,” she said placidly, rocking.

“He came to—” Elizabeth turned the full green-eyed weight of her attention on me, and I’m not proud of the fact that my pulse did something erratic. “You came to withdraw?”

“I came to look into withdrawing,” I said, which was a coward’s correction, and we both heard it.

“From the contest your sister entered you into. The contest that’s going to save the barn? That contest?”

“I didn’t know all of it when I got in the truck.”

“And now?”

And there it was. Behind Elizabeth the kitchen window framed a square of yellow lamplight, and behind me Iris Starling rocked with the patience of geology, and in front of me stood a short, furious, exhausted woman holding a clipboard like a shield over a heart she’d run herself into the ground to protect, and I thought about a question on a dance floor that I still couldn’t answer, and how the only thing worse than not knowing what you want is finding out in a way you can’t take back.

“Now I know,” I said.

Elizabeth’s jaw set. “That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the start of one.” I stood up and put my hat back on, backward, the way it had been. I caught the exact moment she noticed it. Her eyes went to it and snapped back down to the clipboard, fast, like she’d touched a stove, and a little color came up under the freckles that hadn’t been there a second before, and she scowled harder at the contestant list as though it had done something. I filed that. I filed it carefully. “I’m not withdrawing.”

The porch held still. Somewhere out in the maze a crow said something rude. Her grandma’s rocking chair creaked, once, the sound of a woman not gloating with tremendous effort.

“Good,” Elizabeth said finally, in a voice that hadn’t decided yet whether I’d done something decent or something annoying. She looked down at her clipboard like it might rule on it for her. “Great. Wonderful. Then you’ll need a liaison.”

“A what?”

“Every contestant gets an official festival liaison. Schedules, rounds, costume fittings, the whole circus. Somebody to make sure you show up and don’t humiliate the entire institution.” She flipped a page, all business now, the fury folding itself away into a clipboard the way I file a feeling into a half-second. “Dale has Carol. Brody Cassidy’s got Beau, who is twelve, which they’ll both regret. Simon’s running his own, because Simon Holloway does not accept supervision from anybody, and frankly the man’s so organized he should be liaising the rest of us. Tristan didn’t request anyone and didn’t answer when I asked; he just looked at me until I moved on, which is apparently his whole personality. And Jude requested Harper, and Harper said, and I’m quoting, absolutely not. So…”

“So?” I said.

“So, you’ve got—” Elizabeth started, scanning the list, and Iris, from the rocking chair, not opening her eyes, with the serene finality of a judge entering a verdict that had been decided before the trial, said⁠—

“Elizabeth will take you.”

I kept my face where it was. Inside, something took note, the way you note a car that’s been behind you three turns—not alarm exactly, just a heightened awareness that the situation had changed, and I’d be tracking it now. Elizabeth Starling. Weeks of her. The one person on that clipboard I’d have to report to, sit beside, show up on time for. I told myself it was an inconvenience and left it there, because the alternative was asking why an inconvenience had made my pulse pick up, and I was not going to do that on this porch.

The clipboard came down. “Grandma.”

“She knows the festival better than anyone. She’s running the whole thing this year; it’s her turn. It only makes sense.” She took a slow sip of her tea, eyes still closed, the very picture of a frail convalescent who absolutely could not be argued with on doctor’s orders. “Unless you’d rather I got up and did it myself?”

It was masterful. I’d have applauded if I weren’t the one in the trap with her. Elizabeth opened her mouth, looked at her grandmother—small in her coat, quilt over her knees, having just had a heart event—and closed it again, because there is no version of no you can say to that, and Iris Starling knew it, and had known it before any of us walked onto the porch, possibly before she ever climbed into the car to go to the hospital, I wouldn’t put it past her.

Elizabeth looked at me. I looked at Elizabeth. The whole thing had the symmetry of two people realizing they’d been seated next to each other at a wedding by a relative with an agenda, which was more or less exactly what had happened, just spread across two families, one farm, and a whole season of festive fall activities.

“Fine,” Elizabeth huffed. “You’ll get a schedule. Wear something you don’t mind getting pie on. First round’s the kickoff.”

“Understood,” I said.

“He understands,” Iris agreed, to the porch in general, and rocked. “He sure does.”

I went down the steps and back along the lane between the pumpkins, and I got most of the way to the truck before I let myself notice that the thing sitting in my chest, where the exit plan used to be, was not dread. I checked it twice, the way you double-check a lock. It held. It wasn’t dread.

Chapter 5

Elizabeth

The first frost came early that year, weeks before it had any right to, a freak cold snap that slipped down off the mountains overnight, and in the morning the whole farm was made of silver.