Page 30 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

In other words. No kiss. No freaking kiss. I didn’t know if I should be relieved or pissed.

Matt moved before I did, of course he did, sweeping the tray of felt apples up out of goat range with one arm and scooping the runaway kid clear of the stampede with the other, the pot still somehow on his head, and for a few minutes the back room was nothing but bleating and shrieking and laughing and Gwen hollering a string of threats at children and livestock alike, and Vincent van Goat methodically eating the burlap apple sack right off Matt’s costume while he was too busy saving everyone else to notice. I should have helped.

I mostly stood against the shelving and laughed, the helpless kind, the kind that bends you in half, because the sight of Matt Hartford—the steadiest man in Sweetbriar, the most serious cop alive, the man who checked every lock twice—standing in a crooked cooking pot with a felt apple in one fist and a four-year-old under the other arm and a goat eating his lunch, calmly issuing instructions to a room full of escaped petting zoo like it was a hostage situation, was the funniest thing I had seen in a year.

“You think this is funny,” he said, over the noise.

“I think it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“Catch a goat, Starling.”

“Absolutely not, I’m management.”

By the time we’d restored order and returned the goats to the custody of the state and Gwen had marched her mortified middle child off with a lecture about latches, the moment from before—the half-inch, the held breath, the almost freaking kiss—had been packed away, unspoken, the way I pack everything away.

But it hadn’t evaporated. I could still feel the print of his hand at my waist like a brand under my flannel. And when he caught my eye across the wreckage, Johnny Appleseed in a dented pot with his apple sack chewed to ruin and hay in his collar, he didn’t look away and laugh it off the way a normal person would. He just held my eyes, steady, and let me see that he hadn’t forgotten what we’d been a half-inch from either.

“So, um, costume round this weekend. Then we’ll meet again, same time next week,” I said when I could manage words again. “Talent round. You’ll need to actually have a talent.”

“I’ll find one.”

“You’ve got a pot. The bar is low.” I gathered the chewed remains of the apple sack from Vincent van Goat, who had surrendered it without remorse. “And Hartford—genuinely, for the judging—think about something real. Not a magic trick, not whatever Jude’s doing. The town can tell when a man’s hiding behind a bit.” I heard myself say it and felt the irony go down sideways, because if there was a reigning champion of hiding behind a bit in Sweetbriar, she was standing right there holding goat-damaged felt. “Give them something sincere. They reward sincerity.”

He looked at me a long moment, the pot still crooked on his head, and something moved behind his eyes like he was filing the advice away to use against me later.

“Sincere,” he repeated. “Noted.”

He handed me the last of the few felt apples, and his fingers brushed mine, and held, one beat past where a hand-off ends, the tell, his tell, holding on—and I stood there with my heart going crazy and understood with total clarity that the goat had bought me exactly one week. That whatever this was, it was coming, the way fall comes, the way the frost comes, inevitable and gold and impossible to fence in. And that somewhere in the last few weeks, between a barn roof and a rainstorm and a pot, I had stopped wanting to fence it at all.

I walked home smelling of hay and goat, and his clean cedar scent, and I did not make a single joke about any of it to my mother, who noticed that too, the way she notices everything, and wisely, for once, said nothing at all.

Chapter 12

Matt

The costume fitting was behind us, the goat’s crimes mostly forgiven, when the sky made good on a week of threats.

I was home maybe an hour, off shift, still thinking about a back room that smelled of cut hay and a woman who talked faster when she was nervous, when the wind changed. You learn to hear it, living up here in the foothills. The ordinary evening bluster dropped out, and something with weight behind it came down off the mountain in its place, throwing the first fat rain against my kitchen window hard enough to rattle the glass, and somewhere down the block a trash can went over and started its long rolling journey down Alder Street.

Then the rain quit, all at once, and the hail started.

It came in sideways off the mountain and hit my kitchen window like somebody had thrown a handful of gravel at the house, and I stood there with a plate in my hand and watched it bounce white off the hood of my truck in the porch light, pea-sized and mean, the whole yard going pale in about fifteen seconds. That’s what October does up here. It’ll be clear enough to hang laundry at four in the afternoon and pelting your roof by seven, and then⁠—

It stopped. Just stopped, and the silence after it was almost worse than the noise, and then the rain came back in heavier than before.

I believe forecasts the way I believe gravity. I have spent my life being the one who assumes the worst so everyone else gets to assume the best, and the worst, tonight, was a clear picture in my head before I’d consciously assembled it. Jonas and I had put salvage lumber over the storm-stripped corner and lashed a tarp across the whole north slope to keep the weather off it, and I’d told myself it would hold. It would have held through an ordinary autumn rain. But three hours with a nail gun and whatever’s in the shed is not a roof, and what was coming down off that mountain tonight was going to find the seam, peel that tarp like the lid off a can, and put a winter’s worth of water straight into the hayloft, into the feed, into the dry heart of the building the whole goat operation leans on through the cold months.

I set the plate down.

I don’t want her dealing with this too. Not when I can help.

I should have called it in and let the family handle it. That would have been the appropriate thing, the within-my-lane thing, the thing a man does when he has promised a woman professional distance, mostly failed, and is trying to fail no further. And the family could handle it, in theory—except I knew, the way I’d started knowing the rhythms of that household, that the theory was thin tonight. It was a weeknight. Tiffany would be clear across town at her own place with her kids, Donna closing the Stop and Go, the whole sprawling labor force of that farm scattered to its other lives, the way even a big family is never as big as it looks right when you need it. Which left, at the barn, on a night like this, the three people who lived on the property. An old woman just out of the hospital. And Elizabeth and her mom.

I got my coat. I did not call Elizabeth. The appropriate thing and the things I wanted had been drifting apart ever since I’d promised not to fall for her, and I’d stopped being able to pretend I couldn’t tell them apart.

The hail came back twice on the drive out, both times hard enough that I slowed to a crawl with it drumming across the cab like buckshot, and both times it quit as suddenly as it started and left the wipers slapping at nothing but rain.

The lane was already running with water when I turned in, my headlights swinging across a yard gone to silver chaos, hailstones scattered white across the gravel and melting. The stand stood dark and shuttered down by the road, its porch stripped bare, somebody having had the sense to haul the pumpkins inside. The Big House had lights. The little house where Elizabeth and her mother lived had lights. And out past both, the barn hunched against the storm with its one bad shoulder to the wind, and even through the rain sheeting across the glass I could see the tarp had started to go—one corner loose and cracking like a whip, the whole sheet straining at the three ties that were left.