Page 48 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

The change was instant. The sad, perfect thing was gone. In its place was a pumpkin you wanted to know.

“There,” I said, quieter, just to him, my mouth close to his ear with the whole town watching and not caring for once who saw. “The knife slip is not what ruined it. The slip’s the only part of it that’s alive. You just needed one to match it.”

He looked at the pumpkin a long moment. Then he looked at me, and I watched him understand that I wasn’t talking about the pumpkin—that I’d seen the careful, flawless, give-nothing-away thing he’d made and known exactly whose face it was, and that I’d just told him, in front of the crowd, that the part of himself he was most worried about, the crack, the slip, the imperfections, were okay.

His throat worked as he swallowed hard. For a second this big steady man looked like he might come apart right there over a gourd, and then he didn’t; he just held my eyes and said, low, only for me, “Okay,” like I’d won an argument we’d never actually had out loud.

We held them up, one at a time, down the line, and June walked the front with her phone over her head reading the crowd. Dale’s bleeding masterpiece got a sympathy roar. Jude’s translucent horror got a big one. Tristan’s was so eerie that three children cried and the number on June’s phone spiked hard enough that she announced him the one to beat.

And then we got to Matt, and I lifted his pumpkin up over his head with both hands, the crooked astonished delighted face of it turned out to the lawn, and the whole crowd came apart.

It wasn’t close. The cheer for that pumpkin rolled up off the event lawn loud enough to startle birds out of the maples, because every single person there had watched me lean over his shoulder and fix it with one cut, and every single person there knew exactly what they’d watched.

June checked her phone, checked it again, and announced into her livestream that she was not equipped to discuss what she’d just witnessed between the festival coordinator and Officer Hartford, and that her viewers should draw their own conclusions.

The lawn howled, and Aggie hollered “Pay UP” to the entire knitting circle at once, and Rosemary announced from her chair that the round was a travesty and her grandsons had been robbed, which is how I knew it had gone exactly right.

Matt took the win like he took most things that season, slightly stunned to find himself alive inside his own life.

But he was grinning. Crooked, like the pumpkin.

And that—not the cheer, not the round, not the win—was what got me. Because I knew what it had cost him to be up here at all, letting a whole town holler his name and not once looking for the door. Something enormous and giddy came up through me watching it, this helpless, ridiculous gladness that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with him being happy, and I stood there holding his ridiculous pumpkin over my head like a trophy and could not stop smiling if you’d paid me. I was so proud of him I could have burst. I was delighted for him. I was, apparently, going to be one of those people who is stupidly happy simply because somebody else is, and I found I didn’t mind at all.

There you are, I thought, looking at that crooked real grin. There you are. Like I’d been waiting my whole life to meet the man under the careful one, and he’d finally, in front of everyone, walked out where I could see him.

The lawn took an hour to empty after that. Families drained off toward the lot with sleepy kids over their shoulders, June signed off her livestream. The temperature dropped the second the crowd thinned, the cold moving back in over the grass as if it had only been waiting its turn.

Nobody had bothered to pretend, for a while now, that they didn’t know about us. Half the town said goodnight to Matt and me in the same breath on their way out, night, you two, easy as anything, like we were a landmark. Like we’d always been here.

And Matt stayed. Of course he stayed. He’d won the round and been mobbed for it and shaken half the town’s hands, and then he’d unpinned his ribbon, tucked it in his jacket pocket like he intended to treasure it, and started breaking down tables with Jonas without anyone asking him to.

I counted the till at the stand—and counted it again, because the number was higher than I’d let myself hope, well past last year’s take at the same hour, the day’s cash fat with all the small generosities of a town in a good mood: cider bought by the round, honey by the pair, change waved away, second helpings, third. Somewhere under my thumb on those bills a quiet running total was ticking along, the one that never stops, and for once it wasn’t shaking its head at me. We might make it, it said, astonished at itself. We might actually make it. And I watched him through the window—sleeves shoved up, hauling hay bales back to the wagon two at a time, stopping once to reunite a wandering toddler with a frantic mother, the festival coming good all around him and his hands in the middle of it—and thought that the most dangerous men in the world are the ones who have no idea how much they’re admired.

When it was down to lantern light and the three of us, Jonas took the wagon up to the barn, lifted two fingers at us in what for Jonas amounts to a toast, and disappeared.

And Matt collected his pumpkin off the winners’ table, tucked it under one arm like a football, and said, “Walk you home?”

My home is four hundred yards from the event lawn. He knew that. I looked at this man offering to walk me across my family’s farm like it was a distance, like it was a whole evening he was asking for, and I said yes.

We walked the edge of the dark rows with the cold biting our ears and the corn rattling in the breeze to our left and Mount Hood holding the last gray light on its shoulders, and we didn’t hurry. He told me Rosemary had demanded a recount from June and June had shown her the phone and Rosemary had pronounced the phone corrupt. I told him Aggie had won enough off his pumpkin to fund the knitting circle’s yarn habit through spring. Our hands found each other somewhere in the dark without either of us deciding it, his fingers cold and mine colder, and he wrapped both of ours together into his jacket pocket, and we walked the last stretch like a three-legged race, laughing, bumping, in no hurry at all.

He stopped at the steps and looked at the dark porch a second, thinking something through, and then he crouched and set the pumpkin down on the top step, square in the corner where the light from the kitchen window fell, and dug a matchbook out of his jacket, and cupped a flame down inside it.

The crooked face came alive, gold and flickering, the hooked eyes delighted, grinning out at the dark rows like it had just heard the best news of its life.

“There,” he said, standing, dusting his hands. A man finishing a job.

“That’s my pumpkin now? You won with that. That’s a prize-winning pumpkin.”

“It was never mine.” He said it easily, looking at it instead of at me, his hands going into his pockets. “You’re the one who put the life in it. Seems like it ought to live at your door.”

And then he did look at me, and there was nothing easy in it at all.

“Matt—”

“Come here.”

I went. I didn’t decide to; I just went, two steps across the frozen grass, and he caught me by the waist with both hands and walked me backward until my shoulders met the porch post, taking his time about it, watching my face the whole way like he was giving me every chance to stop him.