Page 59 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“He fed me.” I couldn’t help it; the grin got loose. “Grandma, he canned his own tomatoes. He made the best spaghetti in the history of the world.”

Iris looked at my mother. My mother looked at Iris. Something extremely rapid passed between them in the language they’ve spoken over my head my whole life.

“You’re going to marry that man,” said Iris, with finality, and drank her coffee. “I see good things.”

“The eggs,” I said, standing, desperate to change the subject before my face caught fire again. “I’ll go get the eggs⁠—”

“Sit down.” My mother turned the crossword another quarter turn. “Donna can send some with the propane delivery.”

“Okay.” I sat. “You know what this farm needs?” I said, mostly to the ceiling. “Chickens. We are an actual farm, and we buy our eggs retail like townies. We could be selling eggs. I could be selling our own eggs to myself at a margin.”

“Put it on the spring list,” my mother said, filling in a word. “Good idea.”

“We’ll put them behind the barn,” Iris agreed, “and you’re not naming them. You name them, you can’t cull them, and I am not running a hen retirement on my land.”

“I would obviously name them, Grandma.”

“I know you would, honey. That’s why it’s going on your mother’s side of the list.”

“Yeah,” my mother agreed. “I’ll name them Chicken Stew. Or Pot Pie, or perhaps Cacciatore. Egg laying hens are tough.”

“Yuck, no. They’ll just retire and be cute,” I insisted. “Live out their best old lady chicken life in an alternate henhouse.”

She peered at me over the rim of her reading glasses. “Whatever you want, sweetie,” she said, knowing there was no way I’d take care of chickens and then eat them.

And that was the morning. The three of us around that table in the warm yellow kitchen with the coffee and the teasing and my grandmother planning my wedding out loud over her third cup, fall sitting golden in every window, all of it so easy and loud and mine that I forgot, for an hour, to be careful about anything at all.

It was Iris who broke it up, levering herself off the chair for her morning circuit of the farm. “Sweet pea, fetch my glasses out of my bag, please.”—and I dug through the great floral suitcase she calls a purse, past the peppermints and the seed packets, and came up with the reading glasses, and if my fingers brushed the corner of an envelope down at the bottom, I didn’t think one thing about it. She took the glasses, pointed them at me like a gavel, and delivered her exit line from the door. “Bring him Sunday. I’ll make the good roast and vet him proper.” And she was gone, her netted bee hat under her arm, and my mother gathered the cups, and I shed my coat at last and dug the day’s list out of my bag.

My phone buzzed against my hip.

Matt: Home safe?

Two words. I stood there in my mother’s kitchen grinning at two words like a teenager.

Me: Home safe. Grandma has now watched the pumpkin video eleven times and has opinions about our future. Casualties minimal.

Matt: Good. Drink some water. You had a long night.

Me: Officer. Are you checking on my hydration?

Matt: I’m checking on all of you. When do I get to see you again?

And there it was, easy as breathing, no games anywhere in the man. I leaned against the counter and ran the calendar in my head—his shifts, my shifts at the Stop & Go, the festival grinding toward its last big weekend—and we landed on tomorrow, the maze gate, him off duty at six and me on till close. Cider and cold hands and the gate. A plan so small and so certain it felt like riches.

Me: And Sunday you’re summoned, I typed. Roast at the farmhouse. My Grandmother intends to vet you properly.

Matt: I’ll bring flowers. Should I be scared?

Me: Yes. Bring the flowers. And compliment the bees. She can be bought.

Matt: Noted. Tomorrow, Elizabeth.

Mom had gone upstairs after ordering me to take the day off. So I started clearing the table. Grandma had gone out without her purse, of course—a woman doesn’t take her handbag to talk to bees—and it sat gaping on her chair where she’d left it, one strap down, contents on display to anybody clearing the table, and I picked it up to set it safe on the sideboard the way I have a hundred times.

An envelope had worked its way up between the peppermints.

The bank’s logo in the corner. My grandmother’s name through the window—her full name, her legal name, the one that only shows up on documents and headstones—and stamped across the face of it in red, in that courteous language banks use when they are done being courteous, SECOND NOTICE.