Page 23 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“It’s nothing.”

“You’re going gray around the mouth and lying to me.”

“I’m fine, and my daughter’s a hypochondriac by proxy.” But her eyes stayed shut, and the lamplight was clearly a knife now, and these had been coming more often since Grandma went into the hospital—since worry and short sleep had moved into our little house and refused to pay rent.

I was already up. I killed the overhead light, got the cool cloth from the freezer where I’d taken to keeping one ready, and pressed it into her hand.

“Bed. Come on. Curtains drawn, cloth on, door shut, the whole resort package.”

“Absolutely not.” She said it with her eyes still closed, which undercut the authority somewhat. “I have been putting myself to bed since before you were born. I can manage the stairs.”

“Sure you can. But you’re not going to.” I took the mug out of her hand and set it in the sink. “Because if I let you march up there alone out of pride, you’ll stop in the bathroom and take your earrings out and wipe down the counter and check the hamper, because you’re incapable of walking past a task, and by the time you’re horizontal it’ll be nine-thirty and the headache will have won. Whereas if I do it, you’re in the dark in four minutes flat. I run a tight resort.”

“Elizabeth.”

“Mom.” I put my hand out, palm up, and waited. “Let me. You’d do it for me before I finished the sentence, and you know it, so don’t make me stand here holding my hand out like a bellhop.”

She looked at my hand a long moment. Then she muttered something about raising a tyrant, and took it.

I got her up the stairs with a hand at her elbow she pretended not to need, and I drew her curtains against the yard light, and I laid the cloth over her eyes, and I was halfway out the door in the dark when she said my name.

“Lizzie.”

“Mom.”

“You’d tell me. If you were stressing out. If you needed my help, right?” Her voice came small from under the cloth, and it wasn’t the headache in it. “You wouldn’t just hide it, to spare me. You’re not allowed to do that, you know. I’m still the mother here. It says so somewhere. There’s paperwork.”

And there it was, the truth about my mother that has always come closest to breaking me. She was lying flat in the dark with a migraine cracking her skull in half, and the worry that had followed her up the stairs wasn’t the farm, and it wasn’t the barn roof. It was me. She was worried I was hiding my stress from her.

Which I was. Right then. Doing it to her face, in the dark, while I tucked her in and her eyes were closed against the pain.

“I’d tell you,” I said, light and easy, the oldest trick I own. “Get some sleep. I’ll finish the vendor orders and turn in. Yell if you need me.”

“I never need you. You just show up.” A pause, and then, dry as dust from under the cloth, “It’s very annoying. Where do you think you got it?”

I huffed out a laugh that didn’t make it all the way out, said goodnight, pulled the door closed, and stood in the dark hall for a second with my hand still on the knob, because she’d seen it; she knew I was worried. Mothers are the original detectives. She just didn’t have the proof yet, and I intended to make sure she never got it, because the second Heather Starling had proof of how frightened I actually was, she’d climb back out of that bed, headache and all, and try to add my half to her load.

Mom and I split everything down the middle, since I moved back in: the bills, the chores, all of it. What I would never once hand her was the fear. Handing my mother my fear has only ever meant watching her pick it up and add it to everything else she hauls, and I was not about to do that to her. She had enough to deal with.

So I let her rest. And I went back down to the quiet kitchen.

I pulled the festival ledger out from under the seed catalogs where I keep it, and I spread the projections under the lamp with the wood stove ticking and the rain going steady on the roof, and somewhere in the next hour, the fear I’d been outrunning since the hospital finally caught up and sat down across from me in my mother’s empty chair.

I am good at the festival. I can run a corn maze and a pie round and five grown men through a pageant none of them wanted to be in, and I can move busloads of strangers through a pumpkin patch and make every last one of them feel like the season was thrown personally for them. What I am not, it turns out, is good enough at math to make the festival projections into a number that matters.

I ran it three ways. Best case—perfect weather every weekend, a record gate, the contest fundraiser coming in strong, the stand selling out of everything—we got close. Close. A long reach short of the loan, and that was the version where nothing went wrong, where it didn’t rain us out, where Grandma’s medical bills—which I had also found—politely waited their turn. Somewhere around the second column my heart had started up, a low hard knocking against my ribs I could feel in my throat.

The realistic version didn’t get close. The realistic version was a shortfall I sat and stared at until the digits stopped meaning anything, and my stomach pulled itself into a fist, and my breath went short and high in my chest, in and out too fast to do me any good. I put my pen down very carefully, as if it might go off like a bomb, and I did not make a joke, because there was no one there to make it to, and that’s the only time the jokes ever really stop.

Out the dark window the tarp on the barn lifted and settled at its loose corner, pale in the yard light, and I thought about the roof we still hadn’t bought, and the equipment loan behind since spring, and the bank’s word—remedies—and the festival we staked this whole farm on, riding on a month of weekends in Oregon weather. And it kept climbing, the thing in my chest, a hot pressure building up behind my breastbone and rising, and the sting came up sudden and fierce behind my nose, that first burning warning before the eyes go.

I sat at that table and could not find the angle to make it work, and not finding one was a kind of free fall I had no practice at, because I had never once let myself be the person without the answer. I have always had the answer. That was the whole deal. I hand out the answers and the coffee and the jokes and I do not, ever, sit at a table with my hands shaking and nothing in them—and I could feel the whole thing coming up my throat now like water topping a dam, faster than I could think, and there was a single clear thought under the rising panic and it was not here, not in this house, not where she’ll hear.

I made it outside before I came apart. That much, at least, I managed—and only just.

I got my coat off the hook and my feet into the boots by the door, fingers clumsy on the zipper, my breath sawing now, and went out into the rain and the dark, down off our little porch and out between the pumpkin rows, far enough from the house that the sound of me losing it wouldn’t reach an upstairs window—because the walls in our little house are thin, and my mother was up there trying to sleep off a headache she’d half earned worrying about everything.

I don’t cry in front of people. This is a policy, not an accident. People come to me to feel better—that’s who I am. So I lose it out here, when I lose it at all, alone, in the rain, between the rows, where the only witnesses are several hundred pumpkins, and they have seen worse from this family.