Page 5 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“Yeah, right. I got my eyes on you.” I clocked her scheming little smile, and I did nothing, because the burrito rush was starting and a woman cannot do everything.

The morning filled up fast. Aunt Donna’s burritos sold out by mid-morning. A tourist asked if the honey on the counter was local and I got to say that depends, do you consider one mile local, which never stopped being satisfying—the jars come off our own hives, Sweetbriar Starling Honey on the label in Grandma’s handwriting, and this time of year we put out the pumpkin spice batch, our fall special, the regular honey infused with the same spices that were currently ruining my willpower in latte form. We’d sold out of it twice already because fall does things to people, myself being a shining example.

Around noon, a Sweetbriar PD cruiser pulled up to pump two, and my entire nervous system did something I’d been refusing to discuss with it since Levi and Becca’s wedding and my dance with Matt.

I hadn’t seen Matt Hartford in a week and a half. Not that I was counting; the math just does itself when you’re standing at a register all day with a clear view of the parking lot. A week and a half since I’d watched his cruiser roll past on Main while I was flipping the sign. A few weeks since the wedding—since I’d confiscated his warm beer and made him dance with me, since his hand had settled at my waist like it had been issued there, since I’d asked him a question I had absolutely no business asking and watched something open up behind his eyes as he thought about it.

What does Matt Hartford want?

I’d been aiming for funny banter, but I’d hit something else. I knew the second it struck home, because I’d grown up doing the exact same thing he did in that pause—taking a question that got too close and filing it somewhere it couldn’t hurt. Game recognizes game, Officer Hartford.

And then I’d walked away and put it on his tab, because that’s what I do. I’m hilarious right up until the moment something matters, at which point I am hilarious harder.

The cruiser door opened. He got out, and the time apart had not made him less tall, dark, and handsome, which I felt was inconsiderate.

And that was before he’d even reached the door. There is a specific unfairness to Matt Hartford in uniform that I had been choosing not to think about, and now got to think about at close range, against my will. The uniform is just his work clothes. It should be as unremarkable as a mechanic’s coveralls. Instead it sat across his shoulders like it had been cut for him and him alone, the dark fabric pulled taut where his chest and arms filled it out, the sleeves doing something to his forearms that no municipal dress code could possibly have intended. He is a big man—six foot four, broad, not gym-built but solid all the way through, the kind of tall and wide that makes a doorway look framed wrong—and at five foot four I have a full foot of deficit to work with, so that when he came up to my counter I had to tip my head all the way back to keep his eyes, which is its own small indignity I have never enjoyed and could not seem to stop doing.

His hair was regulation-neat, dark and short and combed into behaving, except for the one piece at the front that never quite got the memo and fell just slightly out of line, the single imperfection on an otherwise immaculate man, and that piece of hair has been personally responsible for a great deal of my nonsense. But it’s the eyes that get me. They always have. Dark brown, steady, framed in lashes that were frankly wasted on a man who does nothing with them, and when he turned them on me across the counter—carefully, like I was a situation he hadn’t decided how to handle—it did the thing it always did, which was make me feel simultaneously seen straight through and completely unable to tell what he was thinking, because Matt Hartford’s face gives away exactly nothing, and I have made it a personal project to catch it giving away something anyway.

He came in with the bell jingling, nodded at his sister, and looked at me the way he’d looked at me across that dance floor.

“Elizabeth,” he smoothly greeted me.

“Officer Hartford.” I was already pouring his coffee—large, black, no discussion necessary; some relationships are built on bedrock. “Quiet morning out there?”

“So far.” He took the cup. His fingers were warm against mine for exactly one half-second, which my nervous system also logged for later review against my explicit instructions. He glanced at the counter display. “Honey’s almost out.”

“Pumpkin spice does things to people.”

“Mm,” he said, and looked at me a beat longer than the honey conversation strictly required.

Then Becca said, from approximately two feet away where she was absolutely not stocking gum anymore, “So, Matt. Got any plans this fall? Anything fun?”

He looked at his sister the way you look at a dog sitting too calmly next to a torn-open garbage bag.

“No,” he said, slowly.

“Great,” Becca said, beaming. “Great, great, great.”

He left with his coffee and one more nod that I analyzed over the rest of my shift. What did he mean by the nod? Why not say goodbye or see you later like a normal person? Why was nodding so sexy when Matt Hartford did it?

Becca hummed while she worked, and I rang up gas and lotto and four jars of honey, and the whole afternoon had that gold slant to the light that the end of summer gets, when the sun comes in low through the front windows and makes even the propane cage look romantic.

A perfect day. That’s how the universe gets you.

I got back to the farm at six with three of Aunt Donna’s leftover burritos that she hid for me and the Harvest Festival folder. The light had reached the hour when the whole hillside turns to honey—the corn maze blazing at its tips, the maples on the ridge half-lit, the pumpkins glowing in their rows like the field had swallowed strings of lights. Grandma was out in the pumpkin patch.

This was not unusual. Iris Starling walked her pumpkins every evening the way other people wound a clock—down the rows in her barn coat, tapping the big ones with her boot, talking to them or to the bees or to her grandmother, depending who you asked. I parked by the farm stand and walked out to meet her between the rows.

“Hey, Grandma,” I called out.

She wasn’t listening. She stood very still between the rows with her hand out, bent slightly over, resting on a pumpkin that wasn’t tall enough to lean on.

Something in me dropped before I knew why. My grandmother is never still—she walks her rows, she taps her gourds, her hands are always doing the next thing—and that stillness hit my stomach like a missed stair, a cold little lurch that got there a full second ahead of any thought. My feet were already moving. My brain hadn’t caught up enough to tell them to.

“Grandma?”

“I’m fine,” she said, which is what every woman in my family says in place of sounding a fire alarm. And then she took one step, and the step went wrong—sideways, soft, as if the ground had quietly moved on her—and I dropped the folder and got my arm around her before the next one, and the burritos hit the dirt, and the whole golden evening tipped over.