Page 69 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

The kitchen was bright and crowded with heat. Heather stood at the stove with her sleeves pushed up, doing violence to a pot of potatoes with a masher. She looked over her shoulder at me—quick, appraising, not unkind—and pointed her chin at the counter.

“There’s a bottle open. Pour for Mom first, or she’ll mention it in her toast.”

“There’s a toast?”

“There’s always a toast. She workshops them.”

“I do not workshop,” Iris said, arranging my dahlias in a vase with more attention than she’d ever let me see her give them if she’d known I was watching. “I prepare. Only one of you in this house respects preparation, and he’s holding the wine, so…” She waved a hand at me, and I found glasses on the second try—Heather flicking her eyes at the right cabinet, small mercy—and poured, Iris first.

The screen door banged at the back of the house, and Elizabeth came in on a gust of cold air with her coat half off already, cheeks scalded pink from the walk up from the little house, hair loose over her collar, and she took in the whole kitchen in one sweep—her mother at the stove, her grandmother enthroned at the head of the table, me standing in the middle of it holding a wine bottle like I’d been born there—and the smile that came up her face arrived in stages, like a porch light warming up.

“Well,” she said. “He made it through the door. Grandma, you didn’t eat him on the porch.”

“The night is young,” Iris said.

“He brought dahlias,” Heather said, from the stove, in a voice heavy with something I couldn’t decode.

Elizabeth stopped with one arm still in her coat sleeve. She looked at the vase on the table. Then at her grandmother, who was examining her silverware with tremendous innocence. Then at me.

“Dahlias,” Elizabeth said.

“The florist said they’d hold up in the cold,” I said, because apparently nobody had made me aware I was walking around inside somebody else’s love story, and every woman in that kitchen knew something I didn’t.

“They’re beautiful.” She finished getting her coat off, slow, watching me the whole time with an expression that had gone soft and strange and shining around the edges. She came across the kitchen, took my face in both cold hands, and kissed me once, brief, right in front of both of them. “Lucky,” she said, quietly, like she was settling a bet with herself, “or he listens.”

“That’s what I said,” said Iris, innocent as you please, to her silverware.

“I swear you’ve never mentioned dahlias,” I said with a laugh.

“Sit,” Iris commanded. “All of you. The roast waits for no man’s confusion.”

For a while the talk stayed small and easy, festival talk, passed around the table like the potatoes. Ticket counts. The weather holding. Whether the barn would be warm enough for the dance if the wind kept up. It was easy the way a current is easy right before a bend, and I knew, the same as you know a traffic stop is about to become something else, that Iris was letting the meal warm up before she got to the agenda. I didn’t mind. I’ve been the interviewer often enough to respect the technique, and it’s different, it turns out, from the other side, when what the interview is actually asking is whether you get to keep the life you want.

It was Heather who opened the door, though I’d bet the farm’s whole season it was assigned in advance.

“So, Matt.” She passed me the rolls. “A year from now the festival’s over, the crowd’s gone home. What’s your average day look like?”

It wasn’t the question I’d prepared for, and that is what almost tripped me up. Not what are your intentions—what’s your day. I set my fork down and gave it the same weight I’d give a deposition, because it deserved it.

“Early shift, if I have any say,” I said. “Off by three. Groceries on the way home, because I cook; that’s not a courtship performance, it’s a lifelong habit, and she knows why.” Elizabeth’s knee found mine under the table and pressed, steady. “Dinner that two people eat at an actual table. And then whatever the farm needs. I’m handy. I rebuilt a disaster of a house alone, which means I’m slow, but I don’t quit, and I show up the next day too. That’s the day. I’d take about ten thousand of them.”

Heather looked at me a long moment with her chin on her hand.

“Hm,” she said, which I was learning was this family’s highest honor, and passed me the butter to go with the rolls.

“The house you rebuilt,” Iris said. “On the bluff over the road.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That was the old Munson place. It sat empty eleven years. Everyone in town said it should be torn down.” She sipped her wine, watching me over the rim. “You bought a ruin everybody else had given up on, and you were patient with it until it turned into something worth keeping.” A pause, one beat, deliberate as a chess clock. “I do like a man who works that way. It speaks to how he’ll treat everything else that’s half falling down and worth saving.”

She said it looking at me, but she said it to the whole table, and I understood we weren’t only talking about the house, and so did everyone else. Elizabeth had gone still beside me, and I thought—right then, wine-warm, surrounded—about the folder in my truck with a copy of the grant application I’d turned in. The minute the Harvest Ball was over, and Elizabeth could finally breathe again, I would put every page of it on this table, and there would be nothing left standing between these people and me. The guilt lay back down, and I reached for my glass and let the evening be warm again.

“You’ll want to see the whole farm in daylight,” Iris went on, to me, resuming the docket. “Not the festival version. The real one. The orchard rows want repair on the north end, the equipment barn’s older than Heather, and the east field—” and here she stopped herself, and something crossed her face, quick, there and gone, like a cloud shadow crossing a field, and she took a small sip of wine and set the glass down with slightly too much care.

“The bees are in the east field,” Elizabeth said, filling the little silence smooth as glass, the consummate emcee, and I’d have missed the handoff entirely if I hadn’t spent a season learning to watch this family work. “Grandma’s bees. Forty years of them.”

“Forty-one,” said Iris.