Page 31 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

Right over the section we’d fixed.

There were already people out there. Of course there were.

I caught the whole scene in my headlights for half a second before I killed them. Elizabeth at the barn in a rain slicker, hauling on a rope with her whole body and her boots sliding in the mud. And nearer the house, caught mid-argument in the downpour, Heather with both arms around her mother, out on the lawn in a housecoat and rubber boots, because there was a barn in trouble and forty years of instinct doesn’t care what the cardiologist said—trying to get past her daughter toward the trouble. Heather had her turned half around already, was steering her back toward the porch light with the firm patience of a woman who’d done it before, and I caught pieces of it through the wind, inside, Mom, you call Jonas, that’s your job, you get everyone here, let me—the family triaging itself the way it did, the strong ones putting the irreplaceable one behind glass and dividing up the storm.

Which left Elizabeth alone at the rope.

I was out of the truck and across the yard before I’d finished being furious about it.

“Go help your mother get Iris in,” I shouted, taking the rope above her hands. “I’ve got this.”

“She’s got Grandma, she’s calling Jonas, the rest are coming—” The wind took half of it. “I’m not leaving the roof, Matt. Somebody has to hold it till they get here, and I’m the somebody who’s already out here.”

Which was true, and was so completely her that I didn’t waste breath arguing.

“The feed,” she shouted, by way of explaining a thing that needed no explaining, throwing her weight back onto the rope beside mine. “If the loft floods we lose the winter feed and we cannot—” the wind took the rest, but I’d read it off her anyway, the math she was doing, the same math she did about everything, the column that wouldn’t add. They could not afford to lose anything. The whole farm was a structure being held up by one stubborn woman, and she was not going to let a little thing like a torrential downpour take the next piece.

There is a kind of work that doesn’t leave room for anything else, and I have always been grateful for it.

We worked. I got the loose corner back down, and she lashed it while I held, the two of us learning each other’s rhythm without a word, her small and quick where I was big and slower, ducking under my arms to reach the tie-downs, both of us soaked to the skin inside a minute and past caring inside two. The wind tried to take the tarp twice, and we wouldn’t let it. The second time it nearly took her with it—a gust got under the loose sheet and snapped it up like a sail and she went up on her toes with it, both hands locked in the grommet line, all of her small and furious against the entire weight of the wind, and I got an arm around her middle and hauled her and the tarp both back down to earth, and for a second she was pinned against my chest with the rope burning through both our hands and the rain driving sideways and her laughing, actually laughing, breathless and wild, into the storm.

“You can let go now,” she shouted, still laughing.

“Not a chance,” I shouted back, and meant more than the tarp, and she knew it, and stopped laughing, and we got back to work because there was nothing else safe to do.

I climbed the ladder to get the high corner tied off, and she stood on the rungs below with her shoulder braced against the back of my legs, anchoring me to the earth with all her stubbornness.

Up close I could see where the patch had started to lift. Not failed—not yet—but the wind had gotten a finger under the edge of the lumber we’d nailed down and was working at it, patiently, the way water works at everything. Three hours of my hands on that corner. I’d driven home that evening feeling good about it, and here it was, coming up at the seam on the first real night it was asked to do anything.

That’s the part nobody tells you about being the one who fixes things. You can do it right, do it carefully, do it with everything you’ve got, and the weather doesn’t care. It comes anyway. It finds the seam.

“It’s not going to hold, is it?” she shouted up.

“It’ll hold tonight,” I called back. “That’s all I’ll promise you.”

“Tonight’s all I need.”

And she handed me the next tool before I asked for it, and I quit grieving my carpentry and got back to work, because she was right—tonight was all we had to worry about, and we were going to take care of it.

Then the hail came back.

It arrived with no warning at all, the rain going hard and white in the space of a breath, and it hit that barn roof like a load of gravel dumped off a truck. It hit me too. Hail on the back of the neck at that size is a genuinely stupid amount of pain, and I got my forearm up over my head and hunched into the ladder and heard Elizabeth swear, viciously and creatively, from somewhere below my boots.

“GET DOWN,” she yelled.

“Almost got it⁠—”

“Matt, I swear on this entire farm⁠—”

But I had the corner in my hands, and two more strikes would set it, so I took the two strikes with hail bouncing off my shoulders and rattling down the tarp in white streams, and then I came down that ladder fast, and she grabbed my sleeve and hauled me under the overhang with her, both of us pressed back against the barn wall while it roared.

It lasted maybe forty seconds. Forty seconds of the world ending, and then it shut off like a faucet, and there was just rain again, and the two of us standing in the dark breathing hard with hailstones melting in her hair.

“Are you bleeding?” she demanded, already reaching up, turning my head with a cold hand under my jaw to look at the back of my neck. “You are. You’re bleeding, you absolute⁠—”

“It’s hail. It’s fine.”

“It is not fine, you got hailed on for a piece of tarp⁠—”