Page 47 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“You’re a great source of confidence.”

“I’m the best source of confidence. You came in here this morning looking like a man on his way to a disciplinary hearing, and you’re about to leave grinning about gourds and a girl.” She stood, pulled her coat off the back of the chair, and leaned down to kiss the top of my head on her way past, quick, the way she’s done since she got tall enough to reach. “Two triangles and a mouth, big brother. Trust me. Everyone will love it.”

Chapter 20

Elizabeth

The morning of the carving round came in cold and bright, frost smoking off the pumpkins in the low rows until the sun got to them and turned the whole patch to fall magic. I stood on the event lawn with a clipboard and a travel mug and let myself feel, for about a minute, something I almost never let myself feel mid-festival, which was that it might actually all come together. The lawn was raked. The tables were set. The town was coming. Against every disaster I’d run in my head at two in the morning all season, the festival was working.

The carving round is my favorite of the season, and not because it’s dignified, because it absolutely is not. We line the contestants up at a row of folding tables with a pumpkin apiece and a bucket for guts between every two of them, and we give them a knife and thirty minutes and the entire town as an audience, and then June walks the line with her phone and the crowd hollers for the one they like best and the loudest holler wins. There is no panel. There is no artistry score. There is whoever the people scream for when we hold your pumpkin up over your head, which is the only fair way to judge anything and also, not coincidentally, the funniest.

“You’re sure about the rules,” Matt had said when I explained the format.

“It’s the same as every round. June’s phone reads the crowd. Loudest wins.”

“So it’s rigged.”

“It’s the opposite of rigged. You can’t fix a scream. Rosemary picks a favorite every single year, whether she’s got a horse in it or not, and spends the whole festival loudly insisting the contests are fixed against whoever she’s decided to root for. It’s tradition. This year she’s got two grandsons entered, so heaven help us all. The phone doesn’t care, and neither do I.”

And now here he was, my reluctant contestant, my—I still didn’t have the word for it—taking his seat at the table in a flannel, accepting his pumpkin from Gwen with a grave little nod, as if she’d handed him orders rather than a gourd.

And then he rolled up his sleeves.

I have watched a hundred men roll up their sleeves and felt absolutely nothing. This was different, and I resented that it was different. He unbuttoned one cuff with two fingers, slow, methodical, and folded the flannel back on itself in a neat crease, and then the second one, and then went back and pushed both higher with the flat of his hand, a turn at a time, until the fabric bunched up over the swell of his forearms and stayed there. Which is when I stopped tracking the festival entirely. There was a lot of forearm. Corded and sun-brown and doing something faintly ridiculous every time his hand moved, the flannel pulled tight across it, one tendon standing out along his wrist as he set the pumpkin square in front of him.

I had a clipboard. I had a microphone. I had an entire town arriving and a carving round to run and a grandmother somewhere behind me who missed nothing, and yet I stood here watching a grown man expose his wrists like it was the single most interesting thing to happen all season. Nothing was happening. He was rolling up his sleeves. I was the one turning it into a documentary.

Across the lawn, Aggie sat in her folding chair with her ledger, and I heard her call out, to nobody and everybody, that her grandnephew was paying three to two and the firefighter had drifted to even, and that she’d take a side bet on whether either of them could carve at all.

I emceed, which is to say I walked the line with a microphone and narrated the carnage. Dale had committed, as Dale commits to everything, to a design well beyond his skill and was bleeding lightly from one thumb by minute ten. Brody Cassidy carved something loose and easy and got a laugh. Tristan, silent as ever, was producing something genuinely unsettling. Jude had abandoned all pretense of artistry and was simply hollowing his out to a terrifying thinness, betting on the crowd’s love of a man who commits to a bit. Simon carved like he plates a dish, precise and patient and faintly contemptuous of everyone around him.

And then there was Matt.

I’d known, watching him, that he was going to do it correctly, because correctly is the only way Matt does anything. What I hadn’t expected was how much it would get to me.

He’d sketched his design on the rind first, in pencil, using a little ruler from his truck. He measured the triangles for the eyes so they matched. He cut slow and clean and exact, wiping the blade on a rag between strokes, and what emerged under his hands over forty minutes was a perfect jack-o’-lantern—flawless, symmetrical, every tooth even, every edge crisp, exactly the image that swims up when you hear the word.

And it was dead.

It had no life. It had every feature of a jack-o’-lantern face arranged in exactly the right place and not one ounce of life in it, the way a mannequin has all the parts and none of the personality, and I stood there with my microphone forgotten in my hand and understood that I was looking at the saddest pumpkin I had ever seen.

He’d made a flawless, careful, correct object that gave away nothing about the man who made it.

He’d carved himself. The version he shows the town. The one with all the features in the right places and the real face kept somewhere nobody gets to see.

I don’t think he knew. That was the part that got me.

He looked at his immaculate pumpkin with quiet satisfaction, a job done right—and then, reaching in to clean one last edge, his knife slipped.

It was nothing. A short skid of the blade, a nick at the corner of one eye that pulled the clean triangle into a crooked upward hook it wasn’t supposed to have.

And I watched his whole face fall. Watched him go still and stricken over a ruined pumpkin like the slip had cost him something real, like the flaw had wrecked the whole careful half hour of work, and he reached for the rag as if he could somehow wipe it back to perfect, his jaw tight, the disappointment on him far out of proportion to a carving contest at a fall festival.

I put my microphone down on the table, and I picked up his knife.

“May I?” I said, not really asking, and before he could answer, I leaned in over his shoulder and made one cut. Yes, maybe this was cheating. Yes, everyone could see me. But I could not stand here and watch Matt Hartford look at that pumpkin like he failed.

Just one cut. What could it hurt? I took the matching eye on the other side and hooked it up to meet the slip, gave it the same crooked upward pull, so the two of them together stopped being a mistake and became an expression, the whole face tipping from dead-perfect into something sly and delighted and astonished and alive, a pumpkin that had just heard the best piece of gossip in Sweetbriar and could not wait to tell you.