Page 27 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“Meanwhile,” Elizabeth said, “your competition over here”—she tipped her chin at Jude— “came into the Stop & Go and asked me in a low voice whether the pie round used a regulation pie.”

“That is a fair question,” Jude said, with dignity.

And the table came apart, Levi pounding the wood, Becca wiping her eyes, and I sat there getting laughed at by everyone, and found I was grinning too, because Elizabeth was looking at me while the table laughed, and there was something underneath the look, warm and private and left over from a pumpkin patch in the rain, that said the joke was hers and mine before it was anybody else’s.

She got up for the jukebox a while later, and I watched her go—I was aware of watching her go, and aware of being watched watching her go, and elected not to care—and Becca leaned across Levi with her chin in her hand.

“So,” she said.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re setting me up. That’s what this is,” I whispered. “You told me it was dinner and you filled a booth with accomplices and Elizabeth, and left exactly one seat.”

“I invited my brother to a pub.” She widened her eyes, innocence itself. “I invite my best friends to places all the time. If the two of you happened to end up in the same booth, that’s just how booths work. It’s seating, Matt. Take it up with the booth.”

“Becca…”

“You’re wearing the green shirt,” she said softly, and there was no teasing left in it at all, just my little sister looking at me across a table with her whole heart in her face. “You never wear what I tell you to wear. You haven’t listened to a suggestion from me in your entire life. You wore the shirt.” She reached over and squeezed my hand once, quick, before I could get embarrassed about it. “I just wanted you somewhere warm with people who love you, on a night you’d have spent alone. Whatever else does or doesn’t happen is nobody’s business. But for the record, she looked at the door four times before you walked through it. I think she was hoping…”

I looked over at the jukebox. Elizabeth stood in its glow with one hip against the glass, scanning the columns, and as if she felt it, she glanced up and caught me, and didn’t look away, and neither did I, and across the whole noisy room something passed between us that had no words on it yet and didn’t need any.

“Four times,” Becca said. “I counted.”

Elizabeth’s pick came on—something slow and old, guitar and a voice like honey over gravel—and she came back to the booth and slid in beside me, closer than before, or maybe I was imagining it, or maybe I wasn’t, because Harper stopped mid-sentence and looked at the space between us, and then at Jude, who looked back at her, and the two of them declared a silent truce over the bear in order to communicate something with their eyebrows.

“What?” Elizabeth said.

“Nothing,” said Harper.

“Nothing,” said Jude.

“Good song,” said Levi, to the ceiling.

Simon sent out dessert without anyone ordering it. That’s what finished the evening off.

Savannah came by with a tray and started setting down pumpkin pie—one slice in front of Becca and Levi, with two forks. One slice between Harper and Jude, with two forks. Both took it without blinking, because that’s what you do, that’s what a shared dessert is, and Harper was already stealing the corner of Jude’s side of the crust before Savannah had finished putting it down.

Then she set one slice down in the middle of Elizabeth and me. And laid two forks beside it.

The booth went silent.

Elizabeth looked at the forks. I looked at the forks. Savannah tucked the empty tray under her arm and stood there entirely unrepentant.

“Simon says congratulations,” she said.

“Congratulations on what?” I said.

“He didn’t specify.”

And she walked off, and the table held its breath for one second before Becca broke, and then all of them were gone—Jude slid halfway down the bench, Harper hid in her elbow, Levi wheezed something about the kitchen having eyes—and Elizabeth, pink clear to her ears, laughing, wrecked, picked up one fork and held out the other one to me across four inches of table like she was serving me a summons.

“Well, Officer,” she said. “The pub has ruled.”

“I don’t want to make it weird.”

“It’s already weird. Eat the pie.”