Page 17 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“Jonas patched it. I held things.”

“I watched you. From the ground. For three hours.” She stopped a few feet off, and out here in the dark, away from the table, the brightness wasn’t all the way on, and underneath it I could see how tired she was. How scared. How much she was holding that she’d let nobody at that table see. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know.”

“It wasn’t on your schedule. There’s no roof repair round.”

“I know that too.”

She looked at me a long moment in the cold, and I watched her walk to the door where she keeps the jokes, and then, just for a second, not open it.

“Thank you,” she said. Plainly. Nothing wrapped around it, and I understood it had cost her something to say it that way, with no punchline holding it up.

“Get some sleep, Elizabeth,” I said. “You were up before the sun, and you ate about four bites at that table.”

It caught her. I watched it catch her—watched her whole face go startled and unguarded, the look of a person caught at the exact maneuver they perform so they’ll never be caught—and for one second, I thought she might actually let me in.

Then the grin came up like a shop light.

“Four bites is a normal amount of bites,” she said. “Go home, Hartford. I’ll see you at the next round.”

And she went back up the steps into the warmth of her house, and I drove home through the dark with a foil plate on the seat beside me and that patched roof in my mirror, holding still and weather tight.

I felt good about exactly one thing I’d fixed, and uneasy about the much larger thing I was beginning to understand I wanted to.

Chapter 7

Elizabeth

The rain had finally come in for real, the soft relentless Oregon kind that doesn’t fall so much as take up residence, and the Stop & Go smelled like wet coats and coffee and Donna’s green chili salsa doing its slow work in the back, and I was running on four hours of sleep and the jittery, overclocked adrenaline of a woman with eleven open tabs in her skull and no intention of closing any of them.

The festival kick-off was coming up soon. The corn maze opening was imminent. Jonas needed plywood for the ticket booth, the stand needed restocking, the honey was nearly gone again, and somewhere in there I had a store to run, three shifts of my own behind the register, plus driving Grandma to her follow-up because she had announced she would walk to the cardiologist before she let “a fuss” be made and I believed her enough to not risk it. I had a contestant to manage. I had a contestant to not think about, which was its own full-time job and paid nothing.

So I made more coffee. Coffee was on the list too—with pumpkin spice, naturally. I needed some pleasure in my life.

“You look,” said Harper, one of my childhood friends along with Becca, who had blown in out of the rain at seven-forty with her daughter Bella in tow, “like a woman who has not slept since the equinox.”

“I slept last week sometime.”

“Well, this is this week, and you look like you need a freaking nap.”

“Then I slept recently.” I slid her a coffee she hadn’t ordered because I knew her order, the way I know everybody’s, the way my whole job is just knowing people’s orders and pretending that isn’t a form of love. “Bella, sweetheart, the cocoa’s coming, I’m not a machine, I’m better than a machine because I remember exactly how you like it.”

Bella, seven and grave, was arranging the honey jars on the bottom shelf into a formation known only to her. “Elizabeth, why does the bee on the label have a hat?”

“Because she’s the queen. Queens wear hats. It’s the law.”

“Mom doesn’t wear a hat.”

“Your mom isn’t a queen; she’s a menace,” I said.

Harper said, “thank you”, and Bella nodded slowly, filing this away in the vast and terrifying archive of things small children remember and repeat at the worst possible moment.

Becca was on register, with that high steady brightness she’d been wearing since the wedding, the brightness of a person whose own life had finally fixed itself and now had spare wattage to aim at everyone else’s. She was aiming it at me this morning. I could feel it on the side of my face like sun through a window.

“So,” Becca said, ringing up Simon Holloway’s protein bar with one eye on me. “How’s it going with the contestant?”

“Which one. I have six. Dale brought a fog machine to the orientation meeting last night and tried to make an entrance. I had to confiscate it. I’m running a daycare for grown men.”