Page 38 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

Somewhere deep in the rows, a kid kept shrieking “MOM” with the delight of a child who is not actually lost and is having the time of his life. The hayride wagon ground back and forth across the top of the field with Jonas at the wheel, silent and content, hauling load after load of bundled-up riders out to the ridge and back. The cider press ran nonstop.

And June worked the whole thing with her phone held out in front of her like a divining rod, narrating to the little glowing crowd that lived inside it. I caught pieces of it every time she swept past my gate.

The maze was giving autumn. The maze was giving cozy. The cider is giving exactly the seasonal serotonin you came here for, you guys, I’m not okay.

She panned across the lantern-lit rows and the hay bales and the kids with their flashlights and told twelve thousand strangers that this, this, was why she’d moved back to Sweetbriar. I watched three separate people stop her to say they’d driven up from Portland because of her videos and could they get a picture by the Sweetbriar Starling Harvest Festival sign.

Then she found me.

I knew it was coming. I’d watched her clock me from forty feet out, watched the grin start, watched her cut through the crowd with the phone already swinging around, and there was nowhere to go because I was tethered to a ticket gate and someone had to collect the cash.

“You guys. You guys.” She planted herself in front of me and flipped the camera so we were both in it, her delighted and me in a Johnny Appleseed costume with a burlap sack of apples, looking, I have to assume, like a hostage. “This is Officer Hartford. He is the law in this town, and he is currently Johnny Appleseed, and he WON the costume round, which means our town’s grumpiest man wore a pot on his head for a what is essentially a festive pageant. Officer Hartford. Wave to the people.”

I looked at the camera. I did not wave.

“He’s not going to wave,” June informed twelve thousand people, gleeful. “He’s giving us nothing. This is the most I’ve ever gotten out of him, and I’ve known him my whole life. Look at this. A stone. A handsome autumn stone.” She swung the phone back to her own face, beaming. “Anyway, he’s single, the comments are going feral, I’m not reading them out, moving on⁠—”

“June,” I said.

“He SPOKE.”

And she was gone, swallowed back into the crowd, leaving me at my gate to contemplate the fact that I had just been broadcast to more people than lived in three Sweetbriars, and that somewhere in the comments my entire romantic situation was apparently being adjudicated by strangers, and that the only person whose opinion of it I cared about was forty feet away under the work lights, pretending she hadn’t watched the whole thing and grinning at her clipboard.

And under all of it, the smell—spiced apple cider and sweet kettle corn, pumpkin donuts and cold mud and chimney smoke from town rolling up the hill on the night air, and the sound, that big layered murmur of a few hundred people being happy in the dark all at once, and over the top of the whole scene, off to the east past the dark shoulders of the hills, Mount Hood stood white against the last light in the sky, close the way it gets on clear nights, like you could walk to it, snow on its summit. It looked, that night, like it was presiding. Like even the mountain had come out for the maze.

I’d grown up in this town, walked its main street my whole life, and I had never once, in all those years, been part of a night like this. I’d worked the edges of plenty of them. Directed the traffic, kept the peace, gone home alone. The festival had been happening a mile up the road every fall since before I was born, and I’d spent every one of them on the outside of it, on duty or on purpose, telling myself I didn’t have time.

I had never been standing inside one with a stamp in my hand and a place to be and a woman across the field who kept finding my eyes in the crowd.

I was working the gate, because they were short-staffed tonight and I had apparently become a man who spent his nights off taking tickets at a family farm for reasons I declined to examine too closely, a sentence I would not have believed about myself two months back. I was still in the costume, minus the pot, but the rest of it had stayed on, because there’d been no time to change and, if I’m honest, because Elizabeth kept looking at me in it.

I took tickets. I stamped hands. I directed traffic, found three lost children, and reunited two of them with the correct parents on the first try, which around here counts as detective work.

And I watched Elizabeth run the whole night from everywhere at once, lit up under the work lights with her clipboard and her knit cap and a grin for every single person who came through, the hub the entire wheel turned on. She caught my eye across the crowd a dozen times. Every time, my heart turned over like an engine catching, and every time I told it to settle, and every time it ignored me.

Around nine, she finally came to me.

She’d been working her way over for twenty minutes—I’d watched her do it, watched her get waylaid every three feet by someone who needed a wristband or a refund or a verdict on a lost mitten. Then she arrived at my gate a little breathless, cheeks gone pink from the cold and the running, with two paper cups of cider and an expression she was working hard to keep casual.

“Reinforcements,” she said, and handed me one. “It will warm you up.”

Our fingers overlapped on the warm cup, hers cold from the night, and she didn’t pull back, and neither did I, and we stood there for a beat longer than the handoff strictly required with our hands on one cup of cider like a couple of teenagers.

“You’ve held this post for hours straight, Hartford. People are starting to think you work here now”

“Worse places to work.” I took the cup. “Decent cider. Good company, intermittently.”

“Intermittently.” She pressed a hand to her chest, mortally wounded, and leaned a hip against the gate, settling in on her side of it, near enough now that I could see the lights caught in her eyes and the freckles the cold had brought up across her nose. “I’ll have you know I am excellent company. I’m just spread thin tonight—there’s a lot of me to go around and a whole festival demanding it.”

“I’ve noticed.” I let myself look at her then, which I’d been rationing all night. “You run this whole festival like it costs you nothing. Hundreds of people, and every one of them goes home feeling looked after, like the whole night was put on just for them.” I turned the cup in my hands. “I just keep wondering who does that for you. Who looks after the woman looking after everyone?”

That got her.

I watched the easy thing she’d been about to say dissolve on her tongue, watched her go quiet, her grin slipping into something softer and more dangerous, and for a second, she just looked at me, and the noise of the whole festival seemed to drop away from the two feet of cold air between us.

“That’s not—” she started, and stopped. Tried again, quieter. “Nobody’s ever asked me that.”

“I’m asking.”