Page 75 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

She didn’t need a man standing in front of her. So I lay still and made myself look at the harder job instead. Standing beside her. Asking instead of handling. Telling her what I want, then waiting for her answer and living with whatever it is—no way to force it, no guarantee I’d like it. Every day. For as long as she’d let me.

But for the first time since the phone rang in that farmhouse kitchen, I wasn’t drowning, either. Somewhere out past the fear there was a small steady ember of hope, and it was mine if she’d let me earn it, and even if she never did, even then, I was going to become the man who’d have deserved the chance.

Open hand, I thought, to the dark, to the wind, to whatever part of a man rewires itself lying awake on his little sister’s couch.

Chapter 31

Elizabeth

Igave myself one more minute in the dark to fall apart, and then I made myself stop, because I had to face my mother and grandmother, and I couldn’t walk in there like this.

I dragged in a breath and tried to work out what I was going to say. The whole truth was too big for that kitchen—the loan, the lien, the grant application, the man I’d been so sure of—and I didn’t yet know which piece of it I could hand my mother and grandmother without frightening them worse than they already were. Part of me wanted to give them nothing, to walk in bright and steady and say it’s handled, don’t worry. Part of me knew they were long past believing that. And all of me ached at the plain fact that they were sitting in there hurting at all because of something I’d carried home to their table.

So I set my thoughts of Matt aside. Not because the anger had passed, or the hurt, or the awful confusion of still loving him through all of it—none of that had moved an inch—but because it had to wait, because two people I loved were on the other side of that door needing me to be the one who walks in and steadies the room. That was mine to do. It has always been mine to do.

The kitchen light threw a long yellow rectangle across the yard, and I walked into it the way you walk into cold water, straight in, because there was no version of easing that made it hurt less.

I opened the back door. My mother was sitting, staring at nothing. My grandmother was still at the table, in the chair she’d held court from all night, except that everything about the way she sat in it was different—her spine too straight, both hands flat on either side of her plate like she was holding it in place.

Nobody said anything. The pie sat between us with the server still standing up out of it. Outside, faint, I heard Matt’s truck start, idle a long moment, and then pull away up the lane, the sound of him getting smaller and smaller until the night took it entirely. I let it go. Whatever I still felt about him would have to wait its turn.

My mother broke first.

“Did you know?”

Whatever the call had cost her, it had taken the softness out of her voice along with it. There was none left over for me.

I could have made it small. I have made hard news small my whole life—that’s the family business, the trade I apprenticed in before I could walk. Take the heaviest fact in the room, cut it down into a joke-sized piece, hand it around the table so nobody has to actually feel it. I opened my mouth to do exactly that, out of pure animal habit, and then I looked at my mother’s face, and I couldn’t.

“Yes,” I said. “I knew.”

My mother set the phone down on the counter, carefully, like it might go off again. “How long?”

“Not long. Grandma left her purse on the chair one morning, and I found the notice. I wasn’t looking for anything. I just saw it, and I read it, and I couldn’t unsee it after that. I never told either of you. I never even told Grandma I knew. I wrote down what I needed to remember, I put the rest out of my mind, and I told myself I’d figure it out somehow.”

My grandmother’s face changed—not guilt, but something sharper. Startled. Like a door she’d thought was locked had just swung open in front of her.

“You knew.” Her voice came out very small. “You’ve known. This whole time you’ve been working the festival, doing the math on my debt in your head alongside everything else, and you never once came to me.”

“I didn’t know how,” I said. “You’d have hated me knowing. I thought if I just fixed it quietly, nobody would ever have to feel what I was feeling right now.”

She didn’t answer right away. Her mouth opened, closed. She looked down at her hands, then back up at me, and her eyes had gone glassy and strange, like she was doing arithmetic she’d never expected to need. “All this time,” she said, mostly to herself. “You knew, and you looked at me every single day, and you never—” She stopped. She reached across the table, slow, and put her hand over mine, and it was shaking.

My mother’s eyes went to her mother like they were being dragged there against her will.

“Mom.”

“I can’t do this with both of you looking at me like that,” Grandma said, but there was no vinegar in it, none of her usual bite. Her voice had gone thin—an old woman’s voice, one I’d never heard her use in my life. “Let me explain, Heather. To both of you. Please.”

She looked at the table a long moment, and then she looked up, and I watched my grandmother do the hardest thing I’ve ever seen her do: let us see her be afraid.

“I took a loan against the back forty in the spring,” she said. “I did not think either of you needed that on top of everything else.” And there it was, plain as anything, underneath everything else breaking in me—my own worst habit, handed down whole from this woman, decades before I ever thought to name it. “The insurance came back short on the barn roof after the storm. Wasn’t near enough to cover the repair, and I didn’t want to admit this farm couldn’t manage it on its own. So I went to the bank myself. Signed the paper. Told nobody. Been paying it down every month since—out of the honey money. Also my share of the stand, the market Saturdays, my Social Security. That money’s never once touched the farm books, not in fifty years. It was mine, the way my mother’s egg money was hers, and you never asked after it because I raised you not to.” Her hand, flat on the table, closed slowly into a fist. “I’d have had it paid off before either of you were the wiser, except this season turned out harder than any season has a right to. Honey money dried up along with everything else. I fell behind. And a debt you can’t pay doesn’t stay a secret.”

The honey money. Every jar with her looping hand on the label, every crumpled bill from the cash box at the stand—the bees had been making the payments on their own ransom, and none of us had known a thing.

“There’s more,” I said. It wasn’t a question. I’d grown up watching my grandmother go still exactly like this, right before she reached whatever she’d been holding back, and I knew the look too well to be wrong about it now.

Her chin came up, braced for whatever was coming. “The back forty was the collateral. All of it. The bee field, the tree line behind it. Forty-six years of hives, put up against a piece of paper I signed by myself. Bank doesn’t take a polite little corner if you default. They take what’s written on the note.” The words came out rough. “I gambled the bees. My own bees. Because I was too proud to say I was short. Told myself it’d never come to that. Very near found out I was wrong, in the worst way there is. A lien.”