Page 29 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“I can see the shape of it through the bag. But mostly I can sense your unspoken glee. So the answer is no. I already know it.”

“Whatever,” I scoffed. “The theme this year is Harvest Legends.” I unzipped the bag with a flourish I’d been saving up special for this exact moment. “Folklore. Tall tales. The contestants embody a figure of American agricultural myth, and you, Officer Hartford, are going to be—” I drew it out, the whole magnificent thing, and held it up against him “—Johnny Appleseed.”

He looked at the costume. Brown trousers, a homespun shirt, a burlap sack of felt apples, and the centerpiece, the thing I’d had Donna source carefully from Grandma’s kitchen, the thing that was going to win this town’s entire heart whether he liked it or not⁠—

“That’s a pot,” Matt said. “You want me to wear a pot. On my head.”

“Johnny Appleseed wore a cooking pot as a hat. It’s historically documented. I mean probably—possibly. The point is the children are going to love it. Like, who wouldn’t love a man with a pot on his head,” I muttered and settled it on his head before he could mount a defense. It sat there, dented and earnest and absurd, on top of all that careful competence, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek. “Oh, that’s good. That’s so good. You have no idea how good that is.”

“I have some idea.” He reached up and adjusted the pot a half-inch, deadpan, with the gravity of a man squaring his uniform cap, and I lost the fight with my straight face entirely. “You’re enjoying this,” he accused, clearly affronted by my laughter, which was only sixty percent at his expense.

“I am having the best week of my professional life.”

“And if I wear the pot?”

“Then you beat Jude, who is going as Paul Bunyan and has, I am reliably informed, constructed a foam ox to scale.” I watched it work on him, the way I’d known it would. “He’s been telling everyone the ox has articulated knees.”

Something shifted in his face when I said beat Jude. I’d found this lever, and I was not above pulling it. The man would not put a pot on his head for me, for the amusement of the children in the crowd, or even for the farm, but he would absolutely put a pot on his head to defeat Jude Barrett in a small-town pageant, because somewhere under all that careful stillness lived a competitive streak I was developing an unwholesome fondness for.

“Articulated knees,” Matt muttered quietly, like a man accepting a mission.

“To scale,” I added with grave emphasis.

“Give me the damn pot.”

“You’re wearing the pot.”

“Then give me the rest of it.”

So, we did the fitting.

And here is where the costume round earned its place as my favorite, because there is a thing that happens when you have to physically arrange a large, careful man into a costume, a thing involving proximity, and I had not adequately prepared for it despite having had several days’ warning and a working knowledge of my own pulse.

I have dressed half the men in this town as scarecrows and lumberjacks and one memorable year as the four seasons, and not once has my heart done anything but keep its own steady time while I pinned a hem. It is a clinical operation. You are a costumer. You have pins in your mouth, and a job to do, and the man in front of you is a mannequin who happens to complain.

Matt Hartford was not a mannequin, and my heart, the traitor, knew it.

I had to adjust the shirt across his shoulders, which were wide and muscular. And that was a problem I’d been refusing to think about since I’d had my hands on one of them at the wedding and could no longer refuse to think about with both my hands on them now, the warmth of him coming through the homespun, the breadth of him I had to reach to cross.

I buttoned the cuffs of the shirt, and he stood there and let me, watching me do it with an expression I couldn’t read and didn’t dare try. I had to reach up to set the pot at the correct jaunty angle, which put me close enough to count the gray just starting at his temples and catch whatever clean cedar scent he carried around with him under the hay and the felt. His hands came up to steady me without either of us deciding they should; one warm at my waist while I fussed with the collar, and the back room got very small and very warm and smelled of cut hay and felt apples and him. I kept up a stream of completely unhinged chatter about historical millinery, because random chatter is the rope I climb out of these moments on and I was climbing for my life.

“—and the thing about the pot, structurally, is that it has to read from the back of the gazebo lawn, which matters for the crowd; you want a silhouette⁠—”

“Elizabeth.”

“—and the apples are felt because real apples are a liability; we learned that the year Ben Barrett went as an orchard and the wasps came, you have never seen a grown man run like⁠—”

“Elizabeth.”

I stopped. He was looking down at me, the pot slightly askew on his head, which should have been ridiculous and was instead doing something complicated and unfair to my breathing, and his hand was still at my waist, and his eyes had gone dark and steady in the low light. The chatter died in my throat the way it never does, the rope just gone, my hands gone still on his collar.

“You’re nervous,” he said. The man sized up suspects, and he’d been sizing me up for a long time. “You talk faster when you’re nervous. You did it on the porch. You did it in the maze with your hands on a ladder. You’re doing it now.” His thumb moved, once, at my waist, barely, and yet I felt it everywhere. “What are you nervous about?” His voice was low, growly, and that sound coupled with the way he looked at me scrambled my brain in a way it had never been scrambled before. I couldn’t think.

And the honest answer was you, the honest answer was this, the honest answer was I am standing in a hay-smelling back room falling for a man in a pot and I made him promise not to let me and I am realizing the promise was always for me, I’m the one who can’t afford it, and none of that was going to come out of my mouth, so I did the only thing left when the rope is gone and the truth is too big. I went up on my toes. Or I started to. I felt myself start to, felt the whole stupid gorgeous gravity of it, his hand tightening at my waist, his head bending, the inch from the pumpkin patch finally closing, the back room holding its breath⁠—

The goat hit the door like a battering ram.

We keep the goats fenced. We are not a chaotic operation, whatever the evidence of any given Tuesday suggests. But Gwen’s middle kid had been given one job at the petting-zoo pen, and the one job had a gate, and the gate had a latch, and the latch was no match for a Nigerian dwarf goat named Vincent van Goat who had been plotting her freedom since August, the name a decision my niece had made and defended ever since. The door banged open. Vincent van Goat entered at high speed. Behind her came the kid, and behind the kid came Gwen hollering, and behind Gwen came the rest of the petting-zoo goats in a woolly bid for liberty, and the moment—the moment I had been a half-inch and one heartbeat from—shattered into pure barnyard chaos.