Page 58 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

Mom: I hope you had a good time! No rush, baby. Bring home eggs.

Me: Ok. Talk later.

I put the phone face-down and drank my perfect coffee in the warm kitchen and watched the man cook, the frost letting go of his windows one pane at a time, and I did not hurry home. The eggs could wait. Everything could wait. For the first cold bright morning of my entire adult life, nothing anywhere was waiting on me—and I sat there in the sun in his shirt, thawed through, and let the whole sweet ordinary miracle of it happen.

Chapter 24

Elizabeth

Idrove home taking time to enjoy that stretch of ridge road where the orchard runs out and the whole farm opens up below with the maze standing gold and the pumpkin rows blazing away to the tree line—with the windows cracked to the cold on purpose, wearing Matt’s gray henley under my coat, singing along to a sappy love song I would deny I knew the words of under oath.

I did not get the eggs. I have stocked that dairy case more times than any woman alive; I could find the eggs blindfolded in a power outage—and not one single egg crossed my mind the entire drive home, because I was busy. Remembering things.

The kitchen smelled like coffee when I came in, and it was occupied. My mother at the table with the crossword. My grandmother beside her with her hands wrapped around her favorite cup and her reading glasses pushed up into her white hair, both of them arranged just a little too casually.

And I clocked the whole tableau in one step and thought, with real dread, they know. Of course they knew. I’d driven off to dinner at Matt Hartford’s the evening before, and here I was strolling in at almost noon the next day, glowing like a lit candle, wearing yesterday’s clothes and a full night of him all over my face—and my face has never kept a secret in its life. Two of the most observant women in Sweetbriar were sitting at that table pretending to do a crossword, and I had walked in with zero defenses and a heart still floating somewhere above the tree line. There was no version of this where I got away clean. I busied myself with my coat and tried, uselessly, to arrange my features into those of a woman who had spent a perfectly ordinary night doing perfectly ordinary things.

Grandma looked at me for a long moment over the rim of her cup. “Finally,” she said, with the satisfaction of a woman watching a crop come in, and went back to her coffee.

“Good morning to you too, Grandma.” It came out about two shades too bright.

“It’s nearly noon, sweet pea.”

“Good nearly-noon.” I gave the coat hook my complete and undivided attention, because if I looked either of them in the eye I was going to grin, and if I grinned it was over.

“Mm.” My mother filled in a word without looking up. “Eggs?”

I stopped with one arm still in my coat, heat climbing my neck.

She turned the crossword a quarter turn, serene as pond water. “Eggs, Elizabeth. Small, oval. I texted you about them. You, a woman who sells eggs at the Stop & Go.”

“I—can go get some.” My voice did something unfortunate on some, and I felt the flush go all the way to my ears, and the worst part, the truly humiliating part, was that under the mortification I was dying to tell them everything.

“She forgot eggs. She sells eggs.” Iris was delighted. “The girl runs the store, and she can’t remember eggs. What were you doing that scrambled you so thoroughly you⁠—”

“Mother,” said my mother.

“I’m asking about the eggs,” she drawled with an innocent laugh.

“You are not asking about the eggs.”

“I am a little asking about the eggs,” Iris said, unrepentant, and patted the chair beside her. “Sit down, sugar. Let me look at you. You look happy.”

I sat. My mother poured me coffee without being asked, which is her love language, and pushed the cream at me, and the two of them looked at me sitting there in my coat, and I looked back, and nobody said anything for exactly as long as it took Iris to reach over and pluck at my collar with two fingers.

“That’s not your shirt.”

“It’s my shirt now.”

“It’s a man’s shirt.”

“It’s the spoils of war, Grandma.”

“Ha!” She smacked the table hard enough to rattle the cream. “Spoils! You hear her? I’ve been telling this family, you find one that cooks for you and shows up like Matt does, you lock that down.” She leveled her cup at me like a gavel. “I watched that pumpkin video eleven times. I told your mother the day of the pie round. I said that big quiet one is going to marry our Lizzie, and your mother said don’t say marry too fast, and I said fine, but I’m old, I don’t have time to say it slow.”

“Nobody said anything about marriage,” my mother said to the crossword.

“I said marry. I’m allowed. I’m the matriarch.” Iris settled back with her coffee, immensely pleased with the whole arrangement of the world. “He fed you breakfast, then.”