Page 20 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

Chapter 8

Matt

Sweetbriar Starling Farm’s Harvest Festival Opening Day came in clear and cold and smelling of fallen leaves and chimney smoke, the first morning all week it hadn’t rained, and by nine the whole town was walking up Starling Lane in flannel and warm coats with their breath showing, kids running ahead, dogs on leads, the maples on the ridge gone full red now, blazing against a sky so blue it looked fake.

Sweetbriar Starling Farm sat barely a mile out from the middle of town, close enough that you could walk it if the morning was fine, close enough that the church bells carried out to the fields on Sundays and the high school’s Friday-night lights glowed faint over the ridge in football season. The town had been holding things on that lawn for as long as anyone could remember—the Harvest Festival, sure, but also the Fourth of July, and the spring plant sale, and more weddings than Iris could count, and the occasional funeral reception when the church hall wasn’t big enough for how loved somebody had been. The farm was where Sweetbriar went to be Sweetbriar. So when the festival came, it didn’t so much arrive as come home.

And it had arrived. They’d transformed the whole lower grounds overnight. I hadn’t seen much of it when I was here to walk the corn maze; the dark hid it. But now it was daylight, and I didn’t know where to look first.

There were hay bales set out in rings around the gazebo lawn for seating, cornstalks lashed to every post in fat golden sheaves, and pumpkins everywhere—pumpkins by the hundred, lining the lane and stacked in pyramids by the stand and tumbled artfully around the gazebo steps in every shade from pale ghost-white to a deep blaze orange. Strings of café lights and orange bunting crisscrossed overhead, not yet lit in the daylight but promising the evening. Somewhere a cider press was already going, and the smell of it rolled across the lawn and mixed with everything else until the air was a whole season in one breath—hot apple cider and frying dough, kettle corn and crushed grass, cinnamon and damp pine and the cold clean bite underneath it all that meant the season was turning. Donna’s burrito cart had been wheeled out from the Stop & Go and parked by the stand, doing brisk business beside a folding table heaped with pies and cider doughnuts and jars of honey catching the low sun like amber. Kids tore between the hay bales with their faces already sticky. A bluegrass trio I half-recognized from Holloway’s was tuning up on the gazebo steps. Dogs, strollers, a hand-cranked apple peeler drawing a crowd of children watching the long red ribbons of skin curl off and fall.

And over all of it, strung between two posts above the gazebo, a hand-painted banner that said SWEETBRIAR STARLING HARVEST FESTIVAL, and under it, smaller, in the handwriting I’d stopped pretending I didn’t recognize,

MR PUMPKIN KICKOFF

PIE ROUND—10 AM—NO MERCY.

I’d arrived in jeans and an old thermal I didn’t mind ruining, and I’d worn the backward cap, and I’d told myself none of those decisions had anything to do with the fact that the woman running the event had told me to wear something washable in a voice that had stayed with me for a week.

There was a specific discomfort in it I hadn’t fully reckoned with until I was walking up the lane. For fifteen years, the people of this town had seen exactly one version of me—the uniform, the flat face, the man who showed up when something had gone wrong and otherwise kept to the edges. I’d built that on purpose. It was useful to be a fixed point people could count on and didn’t quite know. And in about an hour, several hundred of those same people were going to watch that man put his face in a pie with no hands and no dignity and come up covered in it. Part of me, the part that had spent a career being careful, wanted to get back in the truck.

But I’d committed. Becca had entered me, and Iris had trapped me, and I’d decided, somewhere along the way, that I was in it, and there’s a thing that happens to me once I’ve decided I’m in something. I stop counting the ways it could go wrong and start figuring out how to win it. If I had to make a fool of myself in front of the whole town, fine. I was going to be the fool who won. I parked down by the stand with everyone else and walked up, already running the mechanics of it—bite-sized, breathing, no wasted motion—and the first thing I saw was Jude.

Jude Barrett was doing lunges.

He was off to the side of the staging area in a tracksuit, actual athletic apparel, lunging slowly across the grass with the grim focus of a man preparing to make weight, and when he saw me he straightened up and pointed at me across the lawn with two fingers, eyes to eyes, the universal signal for I see you and we both know what’s happening here. Harper stood a few feet from him holding a travel mug, watching him lunge with an expression I can only describe as fond annoyance.

“He’s been carbo-loading since Tuesday,” she told me as I came up, with the bright civic relish of a woman who considers the dissemination of information a sacred duty. “He ate four potatoes last night. Four. He looked me in the eye and called it strategy.”

“It is strategy,” Jude said, not breaking his lunge.

“It’s four potatoes, Jude,” she said with a heavy sigh.

“You don’t understand the science of the gut.”

“Nobody understands the science of the gut, because there isn’t one; you made it up⁠—”

I left them to it. They argued the way some people breathe, constantly and without distress, and if you listened to the words it sounded like a fight and if you looked at their faces it looked like the opposite, and everyone in town had clearly decided years ago to let them get there on their own schedule.

Because the other thing I’d learned was the exact size of my own trouble, and the trouble was standing up on the gazebo steps with a clipboard and a megaphone, running her festival.

Elizabeth had her hair down in a loose braid, dark red under a knit cap, and a flannel I’d have known at a distance, and she was lit up in a way that had nothing to do with the cold-bright morning—this was her element, the whole day revolving around her, and she stood up there calling contestants and wrangling her hosts and bantering with the crowd and she was, plainly and completely, in her glory. I’d seen her tired. I’d seen her scared, on a porch in the dark, for one unguarded second. I had not yet seen her like this, doing the thing she was built for in front of the whole town, and it did something to me I filed under a heading I was running out of room in.

“Contestants,” she called, and the lawn turned toward her, and she grinned out at all of us from the steps. “Welcome to the kickoff. The rules are simple. There’s a pie in front of you. You eat the pie. The first one to finish and keep it down”—she paused for the laugh, got it—” wins the round. No hands. We’re not animals. We’re worse than animals; we’re a small town with nothing better to do on a Saturday.” Another laugh, bigger. “Your hosts at the table can’t be bribed, though heaven knows you’ll try. Donna, who made the pies and will know if you cheat. My grandmother, who is here against medical advice and will not be deterred—” a wave toward the front row, where Iris Starling sat enthroned in a lawn chair under three quilts, looking delighted and furious to be seated “—and Rosemary Barrett, her oldest friend and oldest rival, who has heckled this round for forty years and is, she’ll have you know, completely without favorites.” She swung the megaphone toward the side of the stage, where her cousin June stood with her phone held up in both hands like a torch. “And June, who is going to settle every round the only fair way there is. Hit it, June.”

“We’re LIVE, by the way,” June announced, to the crowd and to whoever was watching on the other side of that phone, of which I gathered there were a startling number. “And the way this works, for our friends tuning in—” she waggled the phone “—is I’ve got a meter on here that reads how loud you animals get. Whoever you scream the loudest for wins. That’s it. My grandmother and her bestie, Rosemary, can root for their favorites all they want; it doesn’t count for a thing; they just get the good seats.” She grinned. “So scream as if it matters. Because it’s the only vote there is.”

“I have no favorites,” Rosemary announced from the hosts’ table, in a tone that suggested she had at least two, and gave a small queenly wave toward the end of the contestant line, where her grandsons Jude and Simon sat—Jude waving both arms back like a man flagging a rescue plane, Simon pretending he hadn’t seen.

“I have plenty of favorites,” Iris said, not to be outdone, settling deeper into her quilts. “I just have the decency to pretend I don’t until the cheering’s done.” And the two of them looked extremely pleased with themselves, and the crowd ate up the whole exchange, and somewhere I heard my Aunt Aggie note that the matriarchs were “in midseason form.”

They sat us at a long table behind six pumpkin pies. Dale to my left, already sweating. Brody Cassidy beside him, one of the Cassidy boys off the family garage out on the county road, sleeves shoved up off forearms a life under cars had built, dark hair and an easy white grin and the kind of unbothered good looks that made half the lawn forget they’d come for the pie—he caught me looking and gave me a nod, friendly, no edge to it, a man who’d been roped into this by his brothers and decided to enjoy himself anyway. Past him, Tristan, who owned the hardware store and had said maybe four words since we’d been seated, sat regarding his pie with the still, unreadable focus of a man planning something the rest of us hadn’t been told about, and I made a note, out of old cop habit, that I’d want to know more about that one eventually. Simon Holloway on his other side had already inspected his pie, found it acceptable, and folded his hands like a man who intended to win cleanly and then critique the recipe—Simon ran the kitchen at Holloway’s and brought the same exacting calm to a pie-eating contest that he brought to a dinner rush. Jude on the end, peeling off his tracksuit jacket like a man entering a boxing ring, rolling his neck. And me, in the middle, with a pie in front of me with a whipped-cream topping that I understood was going to be the end of my dignity.

And money was changing hands. That was the part I hadn’t expected. All across the lawn, quietly and not so quietly, Sweetbriar was betting on us, and every dollar of it ran through one folding chair at the corner of the hosts’ table, where my great-aunt Aggie had a whole ledger going, taking the knitting circle’s book on the entire contest while pretending to admire the centerpiece. I heard my own name in the low churn of it more than once—the cop, put me down for the cop, he looks hungry, no, the firefighter’s been training, did you see him lunging—and watched a steady, discreet procession of townsfolk drift past Aggie’s chair, murmur a name and a number, and drift off again richer in anticipation if nothing else.

In the front row, under three quilts in a lawn chair that had been carried out and positioned by what looked like the entire combined effort of her daughters, Iris Starling presided. She’d been sprung from the Big House for the morning under a treaty I could only imagine the terms of, and she sat there small and sharp-eyed, a general reviewing troops she found mostly disappointing. When she caught me looking, she did not smile. She inclined her head, once, the barest fraction, the way you’d acknowledge a soldier you’d personally drafted and intended to keep. I inclined mine back.

A few rows back, Gwen stood with her three kids and a cup of cider in her hand, and she was watching the contestant table—or really just one man at the end of it. I followed her line of sight the way you can’t help doing once the job’s in your blood, and it ran straight to Brody Cassidy, and when he glanced up from his pie and found her in the crowd, something passed between them, quick and bright and instantly tucked away, and Gwen looked down at her cider like it had asked her a question.