Page 50 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“Routine.” She finally looked up over the top of the Kindle, and her mouth was doing its best to stay level and losing. “Elizabeth. That man kissed you on my porch for the better part of a commercial break. I got through an entire chapter and warmed up my tea, and he was still at it. Routine, my ass.”

“You could have looked away.”

“I could have,” she agreed. “And I did, for most of it. I mean, it’s my porch.” She set the Kindle face down on the table. “Sit down, baby. There’s tea in the pot, and your face is glowing; no sense wasting it standing up when you could sit down and tell me everything.”

I sat. Of course I sat—you don’t argue with my mother once she’s put the book down. The book down is how you know it’s real. She poured me a cup I hadn’t asked for and slid it across, and for a minute we just sat there in the warm kitchen with the cold coming in through the cracked window, and the wood stove ticking, and out on the porch, through the glass, Matt’s crooked pumpkin flickering gold against the dark.

“I watched you fix his pumpkin,” she said.

“Mom—”

“Your grandmother watched it too. She had opinions. She’s been sharing them since we closed down.” She turned her cold tea a quarter turn on the table and didn’t drink it. “That poor man had carved himself the most perfect, careful, joyless pumpkin I have ever seen in my life. Every tooth the same size. It looked like a driver’s license photo.” She smiled at the tea. “And then he slipped, and I watched his whole face go down like he’d broken something. Over a gourd, Elizabeth. And then you took his knife right out of his hand and made one cut and gave it a personality, and I watched that man look at you like you’d hung the moon.”

I didn’t say anything. My throat had gone tight.

“Mm,” she said, in the exact tone I use on other people, the one that means I see you and I’m going to wait.

She is the only person alive who can out-wait me. She taught me the skill and kept the better half of it.

“You’ve got that look,” she said finally, quietly. “The one you’ve had since you were small, where you’re already standing out in the cold so the cold can’t surprise you later. You’re scared.”

“That’s not⁠—”

“Honey.” Just that. Gently. And I stopped.

She reached over and put her hand on my wrist, warm from the mug.

“I don’t know what that man’s thinking,” she said. “I’m not going to pretend I do. I’ve known him since he was a boy, and he’s kind, and he’s steady, and past that I don’t have a crystal ball and neither do you. Nobody gets one.” Her thumb moved once over my wrist. “But I know what I watched on this porch tonight, and I know what I watched on that lawn today, and I know my daughter. And I’ve got something I’ve wanted to say to you for a long while, and I want you to actually hear it instead of making a joke and taking your tea upstairs.”

“That’s a very specific accusation.”

“I have a very stubborn daughter.” But she was smiling, and her eyes had gone bright, and she held on to my wrist. “You have spent your whole life being the one who tries their hardest to hold this family up. You did it when you were far too young for it, and you were so good at it that we all let you, and my part in that is mine to answer for.” Her voice wobbled, and she let it. “But somewhere in there you decided that being the strong one meant never needing anybody, and I have watched you get very, very good at not needing anything. And it breaks my heart, Elizabeth. It has broken my heart for years.”

“I need people,” I protested. “It’s not like I hide out in my room alone⁠—”

“You need people to need you,” she argued. “That’s different.” She squeezed my hand. “Whatever this is with him—I’m not asking you to marry the man tonight. I’m asking you to let yourself want it. Out loud. Without the joke in front of it and the escape route behind it. Just once, let yourself want something and stand there in the open and see what happens.”

The deflection was already loaded. It always is—it sits at the front of my mouth like a coin in a slot, and all I have to do is let it drop. Something bright and dry about how I was standing in a perfectly warm kitchen being psychoanalyzed by a woman who reads four books a week and thinks it qualifies her to give love advice. It would have gotten a laugh. It would have ended the conversation clean, and we’d both have been a little relieved and a little sadder, and nothing would have changed.

And then I looked at my mother’s face—tears standing in her eyes, steady, waiting. Waiting for me to do the bright, funny, practiced joke I always do. To wink and wriggle off the hook the way she’d spent my whole life watching me do.

She was expecting it.

And I couldn’t. I could not sit there and let her watch me disappear behind a joke one more time, not when she’d just handed me the truest words she had.

“You’re right, I’m scared,” I said. It came out small, and it cost me everything, but the floor did not swallow me up when I said it.

That is the part nobody tells you. You spend your whole life believing the floor will give way if you ever once say the hard stuff out loud.

“I’m really scared, Mom. He’s—” My voice did something I did not authorize. “He’s good. He’s so good. And he sees me. Not the version I show people, the actual one, and he doesn’t flinch, and I keep waiting for the catch. I keep waiting to find out what it’s going to cost, and when the bill comes due, because in my experience the bill always comes due.” I wiped my face with the back of my hand, and it did not help. “People stay for the funny one. She’s easy. And then the funny one gets tired, and then you find out how long they were really planning on staying.”

“Oh, sweetheart.”

“And I don’t know how to want something this much and survive losing it,” I said. “I’ve never let myself find out. I built my whole life so I’d never have to. And here I am anyway.”

She got up from the table, slid into the chair next to mine, and folded me into her arms and held me. Not a pat, not a there-there. She took my whole weight against her like she’d been waiting half my life for me to finally let her, and I felt how strong she still was, my mother, how steady, all that quiet ferocity she’d spent a lifetime aiming at keeping us afloat, and something in my chest that I’d been holding clenched for as long as I can remember just let go, and I cried into her shoulder like I was a little girl.

“There it is,” she murmured into my hair, holding on tighter. “There you are. I’ve got you. I have always had you.” She pressed her cheek to the top of my head. “Now you listen to me. I can’t promise you it will turn out like you want it. Nobody can promise anybody that, and if I tried you’d know I was lying, and you’d never believe another word I said.” She rocked me a little, side to side. “But I can tell you that you’re already in it, baby. You have been for a while now. The only choice left is whether you spend it happy or spend it waiting for the other shoe to drop. And I would give absolutely anything to watch you spend it happy.”