Page 73 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

It was realizing I was standing alone in an empty barn at night, wrecked, and still performing. Still keeping it quiet. Still protecting everyone from the inconvenience of my feelings—and that Matt had looked at me doing it, all season, and then had turned around and committed the same quiet crime. I could not tell anymore where his betrayal ended, and my reflection began.

Both secrets were out in the open air now, where neither one of us could pretend they were small. His, and mine. Side by side in the same ruined night.

Up at the house, the kitchen window was still lit. My mother and my grandmother were in there somewhere behind it, sitting in the ruins of the warmest evening this family had tried to have in years, with dessert going cold on the table and a truth between them that I had known, and held, and said nothing about.

I was going to have to walk back up there. I was going to have to open that door and stand in that kitchen and say out loud the sentence I had been rehearsing to nobody since the phone rang—I knew, Mom. I’ve known the whole time—and become, in the eyes of the two women I love most in this world, exactly what Matt had just become in mine.

Chapter 30

Matt

Idrove with no destination. Home was out of the question. Home had her in every room of it now—her laugh in the kitchen, her shape in the doorway, the flagstone out back where I’d held her hands against my chest and promised we were real. A man can’t sit alone in a house like that.

So the truck found the river road, and the gate at Riverside Pines, and the gravel loop down through Aunt Aggie’s campground to the trailer by the water where my sister lives with her husband, past the firepit Levi built from creek stone. Across the lane, Aunt Aggie’s Airstream stood dark except for the small amber window by her stove. I cut the engine and sat there. Getting out meant saying it. Saying it made it true. The engine cooled down, and I sat with both hands on the wheel staring into the distance.

The trailer door opened. Levi came down the steps with his duffel over one shoulder, headed for a night shift at the station. He spotted my truck, then me in it, and came over and stood at my window in the cold. He didn’t knock. He waited until I rolled it down.

“Hey, man.”

“Hey.”

He looked at my face the same way I’d look at a scene—one pass, taking in the whole of it—and asked me nothing at all. That’s Levi. I’d trusted him with the most important person in my life once, a long time before he married her, and he has never given me a single reason to revise the call.

“She’s up,” he said. “Kettle just went on the stove. Aunt Aggie sent pumpkin spice bread over; there’s most of a loaf.” He shifted the duffel. “You good if I go?”

“I’m good. Go.”

He reached through the window and gripped my shoulder once, hard, and that was the whole conversation. Then his truck was pulling out, taillights going up the gravel loop toward the road, and I got out, and Becca was already standing in the open door with the light behind her and a dish towel over her shoulder, and she took one look at me and stepped back to make room.

“Come in out of the cold, big brother.”

The trailer was warm and small and smelled like the cinnamon sweetness of Aunt Aggie’s pumpkin spice bread, and it was so much like a home—so exactly like the home neither of us ever had, except on the rare stretches our parents let us stay out here with Aunt Aggie, the only weeks of my childhood I ever slept all the way through the night—that crossing the threshold took the legs out from under whatever had been holding me up since the farmhouse. Becca pointed at the bench at their little table. I sat where I was pointed.

She didn’t ask me anything. She moved around her tiny kitchen without hurry, and set a mug of tea in front of me, and a thick slice of Aunt Aggie’s bread on the table with the butter already going soft into it, and then she sat down across from me and folded her hands and waited, and I looked at that plate and somewhere in my chest a wire pulled tight and snapped.

“You’re taking care of me,” I said. It came out wrong. It came out like a man reporting an accident.

“Yeah,” she said. “Weird, right? I learned it off this guy who used to stand at our stove on school nights making three things at once so I’d have something warm to eat.” She nudged the plate an inch toward my hand. “Eat. It’s comfort food. Nobody’s ever cried with their mouth full of Aunt Aggie’s pumpkin spice bread.”

I ate. It gave my hands a job. She let the quiet sit, topping off my mug once without being asked, and somewhere in the second cup I set it down and told her what I’d done.

It came out the hard way, out of order, backing up and correcting itself—a page that fell open on a clipboard, a number I had no business keeping, all those nights of quiet careful paperwork stacking up behind a promise I kept making myself about after the season. I told her about the dinner. The dahlias. Iris saying husband on her porch like it was already notarized. And then the phone ringing into the middle of the pie, and what it did to that kitchen, and what I saw move across Elizabeth’s face that I still couldn’t accurately describe, and the barn, and everything she’d said to me under that tarp before she told me to go.

Becca listened the whole way through without moving. She’s always been able to hold still for bad news. I taught her that without meaning to, and it has never once stopped costing me to watch her do it.

When I finished, the tea had gone cold in front of me, and the wind was working the trees along the creek, and my sister sat looking at me with her chin on her fist.

“Okay,” she said, finally, gently. “You want the part you came here for, or you want me to be nice for a while first?”

“You’re always nice to me. That’s not the part I’m worried about.”

“Fair.” But her hand came across the table and landed flat on top of mine and stayed there, warm, and her eyes were shining, and neither of us said anything about it. “You’re the best man I know, Matt. I need you to hold that in one hand while I hand you the rest of it. Can you do that?”

“Bec—”

“One hand. It stays there the whole time. Deal?”

I turned my hand over under hers and held on.