Page 12 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

I stood at the kitchen window with my hands around a mug and watched it. This is the thing nobody who buys a pumpkin off our stand ever sees, the part that isn’t for sale.

Just after dawn on the first frost of the year, before the sun gets high enough to do anything about it, the entire hillside goes to glass. Every blade of grass in the lower field stood up stiff and white. The pumpkins sat in their rows wearing little caps of rime, hundreds of them, dull orange under the frost like coals banked overnight. The corn maze had gone pale and crystalline at its edges, every dry leaf furred with ice, and beyond it the wildflower field was a field of frosted ghosts, the seed-heads and spent asters all bowed under their silver, and past that the white boxes of the hives stood quiet, the bees clustered deep inside keeping their queen warm the way they’d done through every winter this farm had ever had.

Then the sun cleared the ridge, and it started to burn. The frost went to smoke, low and gold, lifting off the rows in slow curls as the light touched them, the whole field steaming itself awake. It happened every year. It undid me every year. I stood there with my coffee going cold in my hands and watched my grandmother’s farm exhale into the morning, and I thought about her up the lane in the Big House, home one day now and already too restless for it, ordered to rest by a doctor who had clearly never met her.

So I did what I do. I started naming things out loud, to nobody, to the window, the way you’d read off a grocery list to keep my hands from shaking. Now was not the time for a stress fest. “Frost smoke,” I said. “Wild turkeys in the lower field, eating my Grandpa’s leftover field corn like they own the place. One very smug barn cat. The good kind of cold, the kind that makes the cider taste better than anything.” My breath fogged the glass. “A whole mountainside showing off and nobody here to bill for the view.” And I let the worry go back down where I keep it, in the place I keep everything I don’t have time to feel, and I picked up my clipboard.

The mistake was on it. Fourth from the top, in my own handwriting. M. Hartford.

I’d had a few days to think about it, which was a few too many. Days of replaying my grandmother’s voice on that porch with her eyes closed—Elizabeth will take you—wearing the bald-faced serenity of a woman who had discharged herself out of a hospital bed and into a rocking chair and would run her whole empire from it before she’d rest a single day quietly. Matt Hartford, in a backward ball cap, of all things, saying, “Now I know,” in that low, even voice, like he was reading me my rights. Days of telling myself the reason I’d reorganized the contestant binder twice was logistics, and not the unmanageable problem of how I was going to spend the whole long stretch of festival season within clipboard distance of the one man in this town who had ever listened to one of my jokes and seen straight through to whatever I’d stashed underneath.

“You reorganized the binder again,” Mom said from the table, not looking up from the crossword.

“It’s a living document.”

“Mm.” She filled in a word in pen, the way she does everything, no take-backs. “He takes his coffee black.”

“I am aware of how the man takes his coffee. I have been pouring it at the Stop & Go for years. That is a fact about my job, not a—” I caught the look on her face. Her pen was already moving again, serene as the frost, a woman who had taken her shot and gone back to seven-down. “I hate this family,” I told her, with my whole heart, and took my coffee out to the porch to wait for my contestant.

It was cold enough on the steps to see my breath. The maples up on the ridge were putting on a show, that first real blaze of them, red bleeding into the gold, and the air had the smell I wait all year for—somebody’s first chimney fire drifting over from town, wet earth, the green-sweet rot of the cut cornfield, all of it sharpened to a point by the cold. I wrapped both hands around the mug and told myself I was out here for the fresh air.

He came up the lane at nine on the dot, because of course he did. A man who had probably never been late to anything in his life except, possibly, his own happiness.

He’d parked the truck down by the farm stand and walked the rest, up the long pumpkin lane through the last of the frost smoke, and he was out of uniform, which was the first thing that got me, because the uniform I had filed and handled and could deal with.

Officer Hartford was a fixture of Sweetbriar, reliable as the four-way stop on Main, coffee and a nod and a half-second too long at the register that I had decided years ago not to think about. But this was just a man. Jeans, boots, a flannel almost as committed as mine, the backward Sweetbriar PD cap, his hands in his pockets, and as he walked he was doing the one thing that undid me a little before he’d even reached the steps—looking around. Looking at all of it. The frost on the rows and the maze going gold and the smoke coming up off the field, and he was looking the way you look when you’re trying to memorize a place and don’t want to get caught doing it, the way I look at this farm every single morning of my life, and I thought, he sees it, and then I thought, stop that, that’s a deeply normal thing to do, anyone would look, and then he reached the bottom of the steps and looked at me instead, and I lost the thread of the argument entirely.

“Morning,” he said.

“You’re on time.”

“Is that a problem?”

“It’s a personality trait, Hartford. I’m gathering data.” I stood, brushed off the seat of my jeans, tucked the clipboard under my arm like a shield, which it was. “Come on. Orientation. The tour moves fast, and I don’t do refunds.”

I’d decided on the walking briefing for tactical reasons I had labeled efficiency and which were in fact about never once having to sit still across a table from this specific man for an hour. Moving, I can do. Moving, I’ve done my whole life. You give the tour, you keep your hands busy pointing at things, you stay a half-step ahead so nobody gets a clean enough look at your face to ask how you’re really holding up under all of it—the grandma with the heart event, the festival you’ve staked everything on—least of all you. Keep moving, keep talking, and the worry stays down where you put it. I have a system. The system has never once failed me.

The system had not accounted for Matt Hartford.

He walked beside me the way he did everything, unhurried and even. and here is what nobody tells you about walking a tall, silent man around your entire life at nine in the morning—you hear him. Every step. His boots came down slow and certain in the frozen grass, one beat off from mine, close enough that I could have bumped his arm if I let my attention wander even slightly, which meant I spent the whole tour not letting it wander, which is its own kind of wandering. I stayed my customary half-step ahead. He let me. He also, I could feel, watched me do it.

So I walked him through it. I gave him the whole farm.

Down the lane first, along the split-rail fence my great-grandfather set and Jonas keeps from falling over, to the gazebo Grandpa Walt built back in nineteen-seventy-something—white, hexagonal, six-sided and stubborn, café lights strung up under the eaves in loops. The lawn spread out around it, the wide flat green where the town would pool come festival time, where it always pooled, weddings and pie judging and the long slow dances at the end of the night.

“This is the heart of it,” I said, and then heard myself, and kept walking before it could sit there. “Logistically. Rounds stage here, the crowning happens right there on the steps. If you ever get turned around during the festival, come back to the gazebo. It’s the one fixed point in a moving disaster.”

He wasn’t looking at the gazebo. I glanced over to check he was keeping up and caught him looking at me instead, steady, unembarrassed about it, and then he moved his eyes to the steps like he’d meant to be looking there the whole time. My mouth kept going. That was the alarming part. My mouth ran the tour on its own while the rest of me stood there logging the fact that Matt Hartford listened to a person the way other people watch for weather—like the next word might matter, like he’d be quoted on it later. I have talked to this whole town for a living my entire life. I am not, as a rule, made self-conscious by an audience. He made me conscious of every single word.

I showed him the pumpkin patch where the pick-your-own ran on the weekend; the kids would be coming down those rows soon enough like a small orange-mad army. The corn maze, eight feet tall and whispering even in the still air, Jonas’s half-built plywood ticket booth standing guard at the mouth of it. The farm stand with the honey lined up in the window, Sweetbriar Starling Honey in my grandmother’s looping hand on every label.

“That’s her writing,” he said. Not a question. He’d stopped at the window and read the labels, and out of everything I’d just narrated at him—rounds, staging, five hundred logistical details—the thing he’d picked up and turned over was my grandmother’s handwriting on a honey jar. “Same as the sign at the stand. And the note on the paperwork table.”

“You notice a lot of handwriting for a man who came here to fill out one form.”

“I notice a lot of everything.” He said it plainly, like it was a limitation and not a talent, and went back to looking at the labels, and I went back to giving him the rounds as we walked, ticking them off the clipboard like the safety card before takeoff, brisk and funny and in control, a woman entirely on top of her own life and absolutely not counting the inches between his shoulder and hers.

“Five rounds,” I said. “Pie eating is the kickoff. Low stakes, high humiliation. It exists to loosen everyone up and let the town place its bets. Costume showcase—yes, you’ll need a costume, no, we are not discussing it yet, stop making that face, you have a whole face happening right now. Pumpkin carving. Talent.” I paused on the word, and his jaw set. “Yes. Talent. No, you may not do marksmanship; Jude already asked and was already told no. Then the Harvest Ball and Mr. Pumpkin announcement.”