Page 16 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“He’s the contestant,” Jonas said from the peak, without looking up from the nail gun.

I made a note to discuss loyalty with Jonas.

Beau considered the whole situation with the gravity of a kid taking a deposition, decided the roof was less interesting than whatever Delilah was doing in the barn, and left. That was the extent of the interrogation. He came back once with a package of cookies, handed two up the ladder without comment, and left again.

The rain held off. The light went bronze across the fields. And around dinner time, the screen door of the little house by the patch banged open—the kitchen window had gone warm and yellow, and a good smell was rolling out of it across the whole yard—and Heather leaned out with her apron on and hollered that dinner was on, and that if her mother’s roof had eaten a police officer there would be consequences.

“Wash up. There’s a sink in the mudroom and a plate with your name on it, and I don’t mean that as a figure of speech. Beau made place cards.”

I had been managed. I knew I’d been managed. I went and washed up.

Dinner at the Starlings’ is not so much a meal as a controlled collision.

They’d packed into the little house’s kitchen, more people than the room was zoned for, and the whole operation ran on some system nobody had ever written down. Heather at the head. Donna working the stove and the conversation at the same time. Tiffany and Delilah going back and forth about a car. Beau, the place card artist, had seated me next to himself, which I understood to be a position of honor, and spent the first ten minutes explaining his design choices to anyone who slowed down enough to be captured. Dishes came around without anybody asking for them. Somebody’s hand appeared over my shoulder with a basket of rolls and was gone before I could thank it.

I didn’t know what to do with any of it. My table on Alder seats one. I eat over the sink most nights, or off the arm of a chair with the scanner on low, and the loudest sound in my house is the coffee maker in the morning, and I’d built it that way on purpose, room by room, until every part of my life was something I could latch and drain and account for. Nobody hands you a roll over your shoulder in a house like that. Nobody has to. This kitchen ran on the exact opposite principle—too many people, no accounting, everybody’s business everybody’s—and I sat there braced for it to overwhelm me and slowly understood that it wasn’t going to. It was just going to fold me in and keep going, whether I performed correctly or not, and something in my chest that had been standing at attention for as long as I could remember quietly, without asking me, sat down.

Gwen came without her kids—they were with their dad for the weekend, which somebody mentioned once and nobody mentioned twice—and she moved through the evening with a phone she kept face-down beside her plate and glanced at, I noticed, more than a woman glances at a phone she isn’t waiting on.

Iris was up at the Big House under doctor’s orders. Heather had run a covered plate up the lane before the rest of us sat down. Her absence was its own presence in the room. Every few minutes somebody glanced toward the window in the direction of the Big House the way you’d check a stove you’d left on, and the brightness everyone was working a little too hard at had that under it, unspoken—a whole table loving somebody out loud because the quiet was unbearable.

And Elizabeth was right in the middle of it, laughing.

That’s what I remember most about that first dinner. Not the food, though the food was extraordinary. Her, at that crowded table, elbow on the arm of Beau’s chair, a few strands come loose from that knot she keeps her hair in, her whole face lit up, telling some story about the hay wagon that had Donna wiping her eyes with her napkin. Warm, easy, and completely at home. I sat there with a kid’s place card propped against my water glass and thought I had never in my life been at a table this loud, or this happy.

And somewhere under all that noise, I noticed she hardly ate.

I clocked it without meaning to. The gray smudges were still under her eyes. She’d covered them with the brightness the way you’d throw a quilt over a sagging couch, and it worked on everybody in that warm crowded room because they wanted it to work, because she’s been giving them this version of herself her whole life and they’ve learned to take it as the truth.

I wanted, with an intensity that startled me, to make her slow down. To put a hand on her shoulder, make her relax, and stand between her and her worries. The need for it came up so fast and so whole that I had to look down at my plate for a second.

I’ve spent my whole life being that for one person. And I recognized, sitting at that loud bright table, that the feeling pointing itself at Elizabeth Starling was not the welfare-check feeling, was not the citizen-of-the-town feeling, was not anything I had a clean and bloodless file for.

I put it somewhere. I’d look at it later. I realized I was getting a backlog of feelings I was supposed to examine later.

“So, Matt.” Tiffany had her reading glasses pushed up on her head, and her attention swung onto me. “Becca says you’ve lived alone out on Alder a long time. No wife, no—” she gestured with a roll “—nothing?”

“Tiffany,” Heather warned. “Don’t be nosy.”

“I’m making conversation, Heather.”

“You’re taking a statement,” Elizabeth said, dropping back into her seat with the coffee pot, and the table laughed, and the heat came off me.

That was the other thing she did. She watched the room for who was getting cornered, and she got them out. Every time.

Her eyes caught mine for half a second as she filled my cup, and there was something in them, quick and dry—I know they’re a lot, I’ve got you—and then it was gone, and she was asking Beau to explain the place cards.

Gwen’s phone lit up face-down beside her plate. She turned it further over without looking at it, but a little color came up her neck, and Delilah said, “Aunt Gwen, your phone keeps—” and Gwen said, “Eat your dinner,” a half-beat too fast, and across the table I watched Elizabeth’s eyes flick to Gwen and then deliberately away. The practiced look of a woman granting somebody privacy she’d want back herself.

I filed that too. The cop in me had a folder going on this whole family by now, and the folder marked Gwen had exactly one page, and the page said somebody’s waiting on her, and she hasn’t told them.

None of my business. I closed it.

After, I tried to leave three times. The first time Donna put a foil-wrapped plate in my hands for later. The second time Beau needed a ruling on whether police officers were allowed to have favorite place cards. The third time, I actually made it to the truck.

Elizabeth came out onto the little porch with her arms wrapped around herself against the cold, warm light behind her and dark fields in front, and came down the steps and across the gravel to where I stood with my door open.

“You patched my grandmother’s barn.”