Page 4 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“The bees don’t have to be at the Stop & Go in an hour.” I climbed the steps and kissed her cheek, and she let me, which was Grandma for good morning, I love you, the following things are wrong with my farm. She smelled like coffee and the lavender soap she’d used since before I was born. “What are we glaring at today?”

“The barn roof.”

We glared at the barn roof together. The tarp over the northeast corner had come loose at one grommet and was lifting in the breeze, slow and shameless, like it knew exactly what it was doing. The storm back in June had peeled that corner of the roof up like a sardine tin, and the insurance company had responded with a number so small Grandma had read it out loud at Sunday dinner to general laughter, and then everyone had stopped laughing, because it wasn’t actually funny.

“Jonas is coming Saturday to re-strap it,” I said. Jonas was my cousin—Aunt Donna’s oldest, late-twenties, built like the equipment he ran. He was the muscle and the mechanic of the whole operation, who drove the hayride wagon every autumn and plowed us out every winter and could fix anything with a motor and most things without one. He averaged maybe forty words a day, thirty of which were about torque. If Jonas said a tarp would hold, the tarp would hold. “It’ll hold till after the festival. Then we fix it right,” he had said.

His sister June was his opposite—mid-twenties, back living in town after a few years away, and in possession of a phone she pointed at everything. She ran an account about the farm that had, to the bafflement of everyone over forty, some startling number of followers who tuned in to watch baby goats and time-lapse pumpkins and June narrating the corn maze like it was breaking national news. She’d turned it into an actual job—the thing nobody had quite caught up to—she did the same for half the small businesses in town now, but the farm was her first love and her best content. I didn’t fully understand it. Grandma understood it even less and pretended to understand it least of all, while quietly knowing the follower count to the hundred. But the orders that came in off June’s posts were real money, and in a year like this one, I’d have let her livestream my own root canal if the engagement was good.

“Mm,” said Grandma, which was Grandma for I have opinions about the money and I’m not sharing them with you.

Her mouth twitched at one corner, the nearest she came to a smile, an acknowledgment that smiling existed as a concept. She looked out over her fields—pumpkins to the south, the corn maze standing tall and secretive to the east, the little Christmas tree field on the north slope, dark green and patient, waiting for its season the way it had waited every year of my life. Beyond the wildflower field, gone to seed-heads and late purple asters now, the white boxes of the hives sat in their crooked row.

“The bees are slowing down,” Grandma said. “They know.”

“Know what?”

“That it’s ending.” She said it the way she said everything, brisk and certain, and then ruined my entire morning by adding, “Beautifully, of course. That’s the whole trick of it.” That was just how my grandmother talks. Iris Starling has been making oracle pronouncements over coffee since before I was born. “Go to work,” she said. “You’ll be late.”

So I went to work, which meant the Stop & Go, which sat at the center of Sweetbriar both geographically and spiritually—gas out front, coffee and lottery tickets inside, and my aunt Donna’s breakfast burritos performing their daily miracle out of the back kitchen. My family had owned it for three generations, which made me, depending on the hour, the manager, the cashier, the burrito quartermaster, and the town’s least licensed therapist.

The Stop & Go was only the front of the operation, though. Starlings had been quietly buying up the unglamorous machinery of Sweetbriar for a hundred years—the farm first and always, then the store, then the Wash & Fold two doors down where half the town did its laundry and all of its gossiping, and then, somewhere along the way, every vending machine in the county. If you bought a soda in Sweetbriar—at the hardware store, the clinic, the high school gym, the rest stop out on the highway, the hospital two miles up the road—you bought it from us. Grandma called it diversification. Aunt Tiffany called it The Route. I called it the reason I’d spent half my childhood riding shotgun in a van full of quarters and off-brand cola, and the reason I knew the inside of every building in this town, because sooner or later all of them needed restocking, and sooner or later that meant a Starling showing up with a hand truck.

It also meant that when something broke in Sweetbriar, it was usually ours, and sometimes my problem to deal with.

The bell jingled when I pushed through the door, and my employee and childhood friend, Becca, looked up from the register she was already running.

Here is the thing about Becca Hartford—Becca Barrett now—she still did a little pause whenever anyone said it, like the name was a gift she kept getting to unwrap. I’d hired her back when she was rebuilding her whole life out of a campground trailer and pretending she was totally fine, and somewhere between then and now she’d stopped being my employee who was also my childhood friend and become one of my best friends who was also, technically, on the schedule. She’d offered to quit after the wedding. I’d offered to bury her behind the propane cage. We’d compromised on three shifts a week.

“You did the thing,” she said, pointing at my travel mug.

“I did the thing.”

“First one of the season?”

“It’s practically still summer, Becca. I held out as long as any reasonable person could. There are people with less self-control running entire governments.”

“You’re a portrait of restraint.” She finished ringing up Simon Holloway—Levi’s cousin, who owned the pub out on Main that bore his name, and who bought a protein bar every morning to balance out the burrito he’d buy at ten, an accounting system he’d been running for years and we all respected too much to audit. Marrying into the Barretts meant Becca had acquired roughly forty new relatives, and a solid dozen of them came through my store before noon. “How’s your Grandma?”

“Up before the fog, mad at a tarp.”

Becca’s whole face went soft and stupid for a second, the way it did now about once an hour, and then she snapped out of it and looked at me with an entirely different expression. The expression of a woman who has been thinking, possibly planning, and it would definitely be something I wouldn’t approve of based on the way her eyes darted away.

I’d known her too long. “What?”

“Nothing.” She moved down the counter and straightened a display that did not need straightening.

“Becca.”

“It’s nothing.” She restocked the gum with the fake energy of someone who wasn’t plotting behind my back. “I was just thinking about the Harvest Festival. The contest entries close Friday, you know.”

“I do know. I’m running the entire festival this year. It’s my turn. The entry forms are in my car, my kitchen, and one is somehow in my shower.”

“Mm,” Becca said, sounding so much like my grandmother that I narrowed my eyes and glared at her. “So who’s entered for Mr. Pumpkin so far?”

“The usual suspects. Dale from the grocery store, as usual. Plus, your new brother-in-law entered because Levi dared him, and he has since begun training. He came in last week and asked me if the pie-eating round had a regulation pie. Becca, he’s taking it seriously. We should all be frightened.” I narrowed my eyes at her even more, until they were practically closed. “Why?”

“No reason.” She smiled at the lottery tickets. “No reason at all.”