Page 68 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“I’ve earned it.”

“You have not earned—” She stopped, gasped, and gave up the sentence entirely, and I decided some arguments are better lost than won.

Dawn found us tangled in my sheets with the window going gray, my chin in her hair, neither of us anywhere near asleep and both of us pretending otherwise.

“Four hours,” she mumbled into my shoulder, not moving an inch to do anything about it.

“Three, now. Maybe. I’ve lost track of time.”

“Shut up and hold still, Hartford. I’m not finished with you yet.”

I held still. Best order I’ve taken all year.

Chapter 28

Matt

The Harvest Ball was tomorrow, which in festival time is no time at all, and the whole farm had settled into the last hard sprint of the season—the controlled panic of a family that has thrown the same party for a hundred years and still half believes each one might be the year it all falls apart.

I saw Elizabeth in fifteen-minute increments the entire stretch all week. A coffee handed across the counter at the Stop & Go. A kiss at the maze gate at shift change. Her voice on the phone at eleven at night gone rough at the edges with tiredness, both of us saying goodnight like it was a promise we were making instead of a thing we were doing. The season was closing in, same as every fall. Except this year I had somebody to be closed in with, and I would have worked doubles till Christmas to keep it.

And then there was the dinner.

Elizabeth had delivered the summons days ago, by text, in her official capacity as family courier—Iris has issued her decree. Dinner. It’s time. I had been thinking about it ever since with a mix of feelings I’d have had trouble writing up in any report. I wanted it badly. I was terrified of it. Those turn out to be the same feeling wearing different jackets.

I stood in front of my closet that evening longer than I have ever stood in front of it in my life, and ironed a shirt I had already ironed, and drove out to the farm with a bunch of dahlias on the passenger seat, russet and deep red, because the florist said they held up in the cold and I’d thought, without letting the thought finish, that they’d still be alive on that table long after tonight went however it was going to go.

The main farmhouse sits up the rise from the rest of the farm with its big porch wrapped around it like a granny with her arms crossed, and every light in the front of it was on when I pulled up, gold in every window, smoke standing straight up out of the chimney in the cold. I had been on that porch a dozen times by now. I had never once been past it. The porch was where Iris received the world—her chair, her quilt, her court—and the door behind it had stayed her country, and I understood, sitting in my truck with the dahlias, that being asked through it was the entire point of tonight.

I sat one full minute before I got out. I’m not ashamed of that. I’ve kicked in doors with less on the line than this one that was about to be opened for me.

She had it open before I reached the top step.

“Dahlias,” Iris said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Not roses.”

“Roses felt like they were trying too hard.”

“They are. They always are.” She took the bunch from me and turned them once under the porch light, inspecting, and then she looked up at me over them with those quick dark eyes and said, “My husband brought me dahlias the autumn he proposed. I don’t suppose Elizabeth told you that.”

“No, ma’am. She did not.”

“Hm. Well. Either you’re lucky, or you listen. Both are useful in a husband.”

And she turned and went inside with my flowers like she hadn’t just fired that word straight through the center of my chest. Husband. She’d said it the way she says everything—dry, waiting for a reaction. She glanced back already three steps into the hallway—and I stood on the dark porch one second longer with my heart turning over in my chest because I am not a man who lets himself want things out loud, I never have been, and she’d just said the biggest wish in the world out loud for me, casual as commenting on the frost, and some part of me I keep locked down tight had answered yes before I could stop it. Yes. That. That’s what I’m here applying for, ma’am, if we’re being honest about it.

I got myself under control again and followed her through the door.

Inside, the house was low-ceilinged and warm, and looked exactly like what it was: a place one family has lived in for multiple generations without once consulting a decorator.

The front hall had a runner worn down the middle like a deer trail. There were photographs going up the stairs in frames that matched nothing, decades of school pictures and wedding pictures and one enormous hand-tinted portrait of a stern couple I took to be Iris’s parents, glaring down the stairwell at me like a checkpoint. The sitting room off the hall had a wood stove ticking, a chair beside it with a man’s deep shape still worn into it that nobody, I would have bet my badge, had sat in for years, and on every flat surface—the mantel, the sideboard, the piano nobody had warned me about—stood little museums of the family. Fair ribbons. A jar of old pennies. Children’s pottery of no determinable era. The whole house smelled like the roast and wood smoke off the stove and, under it, that old-house smell of a place that has been kept warm through a great many winters, and it hit me somewhere deep, because my house growing up never smelled like anything at all.

Nobody had ever once cooked like this because I was coming. My whole childhood, dinner was a thing that happened if I made it happen. I learned to cook so Becca would grow up thinking somebody was in charge. And now here was a kitchen at the end of the hall throwing everything it had at the evening because I was expected, and I hadn’t even gotten my coat off.

“You’re letting the cold in,” Iris called from the kitchen, “and you’re gawking at my hallway. Come in here.”