Page 3 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“You owe me another dance someday,” she called. “I’m putting it on your tab.”

Then she was gone, folded into the party, her laugh surfacing somewhere near the cake table thirty seconds later like a buoy marking where the warmth went.

I stood on the edge of the dance floor with two untouched glasses and a warm beer in custody, watching my sister dance in the middle of the life I’d helped her get, on the first night of mine that belonged to nobody.

I still didn’t have an answer. But for the first time in years, the question had a smell to it—apple cider and crushed leaves and something warm underneath, like cinnamon—and it was walking around a wedding in a dark green dress, already laughing at somebody else’s joke.

I picked up my beer. I checked the side gate on my way past. Old habits.

The question rode shotgun the whole way home, and it was still there when I let myself into my house—clean, quiet, every room squared away, the guest bed made up for a sister who had her own home. I stood in the hallway with my keys in my hand and listened to all that order say nothing back.

What does Matt Hartford want?

I didn’t have an answer.

And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I wanted one.

Chapter 1

Elizabeth

There are two kinds of people in this world—people who think pumpkin spice is a marketing scheme, and people who understand it’s a national holiday.

I made the first one of the season the way my grandmother taught me—real pumpkin, real cinnamon, nutmeg grated by hand, and I carried it to the kitchen window while it was still too hot to drink, because the ritual wasn’t about drinking it. The ritual was about standing at the window of our little house, the mug warming both hands, looking out over the pumpkin patch while the fog lay low on the field, like the whole farm was still under its blanket and didn’t want to get up yet.

First pumpkin spice of the season. The last days of August, technically too early, but I did not care, and I said so out loud.

“You’ve been talking about this latte since the Fourth of July,” my mother said from behind me, not looking up from her crossword.

“That’s the restraint part. The waiting is what makes it special. It’s all about the anticipation.”

It was just the two of us in the house now—me and my mother, who did the crossword in pen every morning at the kitchen table like a woman with nothing to prove—though it hadn’t always been this way. My sister Gwen and I grew up in these same rooms, and the quiet that settled in after Gwen moved out and started raising her own family across town had taken some getting used to.

My mother had never married my father, which I used to think was the headline of our family and eventually figured out was barely a footnote. He left, she stayed, the farm closed around us like a hand, and that was that.

People hear grown woman living with her mother and arrange their faces into something sympathetic, and I let them, because explaining the truth takes too long. The truth is that Heather Starling is the best roommate I’ve ever had. She pays half, she doesn’t touch my coffee setup, she communicates almost entirely through crossword clues and significant silences, and on the rare occasions the world knocks one of us over, the other one is already standing there. We’d talked about my getting my own place exactly twice in ten years, both times in the tone you use for discussing a trip neither of you intends to take.

The fog was starting to lift off the far rows in the pumpkin patch. Out there, several hundred pumpkins were doing their slow, secret, final work—going from green to gold to that deep, ridiculous orange that doesn’t look real even when you grew it yourself—and before long every kid in Sweetbriar would come tearing down those rows looking for The One, and the air would smell like kettle corn and fryer oil and crushed leaves, and the Harvest Festival would eat my entire life in the best possible way.

Fall was coming. I had my first pumpkin spice latte of the season. The maples on the ridge had started going gold at the tips, like somebody was lighting the season one match at a time.

It was a perfect morning. I should have known better than to let myself feel this content. Perfect mornings are how the universe gets you to put your guard down.

Our house sat at the edge of the pumpkin patch, and I mean that the way other people say their house sits on a street. The patch was our view, our weather report, and our front-yard neighbor. The house itself was small and white with green shutters, story-and-a-half, the kind of farm cottage that got built for a hired hand a hundred years ago and then never stopped being useful. It had been my parents’ place before it was ours—my mother moved in when she was pregnant with Gwen, my father moved out a few years after I came along, and my mother simply never left. It was the only home I’d ever had. People sometimes assumed we lived in the cramped cottage because the Big House was full, but it was the other way around. This was ours. We’d never wanted the bigger one.

The porch was barely big enough for the two chairs on it, which was fine, because there were two of us. Window boxes that Mom had surrendered to mums sometime in August. Inside, the kitchen was the biggest room in the house, because Starlings have priorities—the window over the sink looking straight down the pumpkin rows, my coffee operation colonizing one entire counter by treaty, the wood stove in the corner that made the whole downstairs smell faintly of cedar from October to April. Mom’s crossword chair by the front window with the good light. Grandma’s old quilts on both beds, upstairs, in the two small rooms under the slope of the roof where my mother and I had slept across the hall from each other all our lives, give or take my one apartment in my twenties, which we refer to as my gap year. Every fall I decorated the place a little harder than the fall before. Mom had stopped commenting a few years back, which I took as approval.

Up the gravel lane, behind two ancient maples that were currently auditioning for a postcard, sat the Big House—which is what everyone called my grandmother’s farmhouse even though it was maybe four rooms bigger than ours. Two full stories of white clapboard, black shutters, and a wraparound porch so deep you could weather a storm on it, which we had. Grandma had raised her whole family in that house—my mother and my aunts, all of them—back when Grandpa Walt was alive, and the place ran loud and full. It had emptied and refilled a dozen times since. Grandchildren rotated through it the way pumpkins rotated through the field, whoever needed a landing spot getting a room until they got back on their feet. Jonas had only just moved out into his own place in the spring, and there was quiet talk that June might move back in, which Grandma pretended to dread and had already, I suspected, aired out a room for. But it was Grandma’s house, the way ours was ours, and the lane between them was exactly as long as three generations of Starling women had decided it needed to be.

The porch was the best room of that house—the swing at the east end, the rotation of rocking chairs Grandma rearranged according to a system she’d never explained, the rail wide enough to cool a pie on, which it did, the screen door that banged in a two-note way you could hear clear across the patch, so that all my life, the sound of that door meant Grandma’s coming. The whole thing sat up there like it was watching the rest of the farm, and between the two houses ran everything else—the barn, the equipment shed, the farm stand, the first rows of the corn maze, and about a hundred years of Starling family history, give or take a scandal.

I took my latte and walked up the lane.

“You’re late,” Grandma said.

“It’s six forty in the morning.”

“The bees have been up for an hour.”