Page 76 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

The refrigerator hummed into the silence, the only thing in the kitchen with nerve enough to make a sound. The pie between us had stopped steaming a long time ago.

My mother made a sound I didn’t have a name for. Not a sob. Something smaller and worse, air going out of her all at once, like a held breath finally given up. “You gambled the bees,” she said. “And you never said a word.”

“I know what they mean to this family, Heather.”

“Then how could you—” My mother stopped, pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth, and held herself together the way I do, the way her mother does. But even mid-breath, even with her voice climbing, her free hand found my arm and stayed there, gripping, like she needed to touch me as much as she needed to be angry at me. “You didn’t tell me. I do the books, Mom. I would have found a way. We would have found a way together.” Her eyes came to me. “And you. You already knew, and I had no idea you were shouldering that too, all by yourself, at your age, and I am so angry at both of you, and I don’t know how to be angry and want to hug you both at the same time, but here we are.”

She pulled me into her before I could answer, one arm hard around my shoulders, her chin coming down against the top of my head the way it had when I was small enough to fit entirely under it.

“You know the worst part,” she said into my hair, half a laugh buried somewhere under the hurt. “I do the books. I balance this farm to the penny every single month. You could not have kept this from me forever, either one of you. I was going to find it eventually, some random day, doing the exact thing I do every week, and then I’d have found out that way instead—cold, off a ledger, with nobody in the room to hold onto.” She pulled back just far enough to look between the two of us, exasperated and fond at once. “You are both, without exception, the two most hardheaded women this family has ever produced, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to survive either of you, let alone both.”

“I’m sorry,” I said into her shoulder, and it came out smaller than I wanted it to, smaller than what I was apologizing for. “I didn’t tell you because I thought I could handle it before it ever had to touch either of you, and because—” I stopped, because I knew exactly where the sentence was headed and I didn’t want to say it, and I made myself say it anyway. “Because I thought if I told you, it would become real. And if it stayed a secret I held alone, I could keep managing it instead of watching you have to feel it too.”

My mother didn’t let go of me. When she spoke again, the fight had drained out of her, and what was left was plain grief, which was so much harder to bear.

“You sound exactly like your grandmother,” she said quietly. “Do you understand that? Word for word. You just gave me my mother’s speech back with different nouns in it.” She shook her head, her chin still resting on me. “I raised a daughter who thinks love means carrying everything alone so nobody else ever has to feel it. I did not mean to raise that. I don’t know when it happened.”

“It happened,” Grandma said, low, “because I taught her. Not on purpose—I never sat her down and handed it to her. God knows I’d have stopped myself if I’d seen what I was doing. But she was small when her father left, small enough that she should have been allowed to just be a child about it, and instead she watched me hold this family together and never once let either of you see what it cost me. Children learn what they watch, not what you tell them. She picked it up, and I didn’t notice she’d learned it until it was already hers.” She looked down at her hands like they belonged to somebody else. “I did it to protect you from my worry, Heather. Every hard season on this farm, the whole time you were growing up. I called it strength. Was so proud of how well it worked, I never once stopped to ask what it cost the people on the other end of it. You didn’t get to help me tonight because I never let you learn how. And Elizabeth didn’t tell you because she’d already learned the family trade before either of us noticed she was watching.”

Outside the window, the yard had gone fully dark, the last of the porch light pooling at the bottom of the steps. Somewhere down the rows the wind moved through what was left of the season. I made myself ask it.

“Grandma.” My voice cracked on it, finally—the question I’d been holding since the barn. “In the hospital. When you got sick. I told you I’d save the farm, and you said that wasn’t the promise you wanted.” I had to stop and breathe before I could finish. “What was it? What did you actually want from me?”

My grandmother looked at me a long time. Her eyes were bright, and she let them be—no performance in it now, nothing guarded, just an old woman looking at the granddaughter she loves more than her own hard-won pride.

“I wanted you to stop being alone inside your own family,” she said. “That’s all it ever was. You’ve been carrying this farm, and this family’s worry, by yourself, since you were barely more than a girl. Laughing the whole time so nobody would notice you were doing it alone. And I let you. Because it looked so much like strength, like me. I was proud of you because it was what I’d always done. I didn’t want a promise about money. I wanted a promise that you’d let somebody stand next to you. Your mother. Me. Whoever else earns the right to, someday.” Her voice broke then, the crack going all the way down. “You gave me a speech about paper airplanes, and I let you make a joke instead of making you talk to me. I’ve had a great deal of practice teaching this family to hide its worry behind a good line delivered well.”

I was crying now, the same silent shaking kind I’d done alone in the barn, except this time nobody was pretending not to see it, and my mother’s arms only tightened around me instead of letting go. After a moment I felt my grandmother’s hand, dry and light and very old, come to rest against my back, and then she was up out of her chair and around the table, slower than she used to move, and folded herself into the two of us until there wasn’t a seam left between where one of us ended, and the next began.

Nobody said it was all right. It wasn’t all right, not yet, not close. But we stood there a long time, the three of us, holding on in the middle of the best dinner this house had tried to throw in years, and for the first time in longer than any of us could probably say, none of us was doing it alone tonight. Whatever came next—the bank, the Harvest Ball, and whatever I still had to figure out about a man who’d already driven off into the dark—we were going to find our way through it the way we should have been doing it all along. Together, three sets of hands on the same weight.

Chapter 32

Matt

Iwoke up on Becca’s couch with a crick in my neck and gray light coming through the blinds, the kind that means it’s later than you think and earlier than you want. For a few seconds I didn’t remember why I was there instead of my own bed, and then I did, all at once, the whole night coming back down on me like a shelf giving way.

Levi came in a little after that, straight from the station, a cardboard tray of cups in one hand and a bag from Violet’s swinging off two fingers of the other.

“You’re up,” he said, like it was a mixed result.

“Define up.”

“Vertical. I’ll take it.” He set the bag on the counter and started pulling muffins out of it, and Becca appeared from the back a minute later in one of his old shirts, and reached past both of us for a coffee without a word, which told me she’d been awake before either of us and just hadn’t bothered getting up yet.

“You look terrible,” she said, sitting down across from me at the little table.

“Thank you.”

“I mean it kindly. You look like a man who’s been rehearsing a conversation with the ceiling all morning.” She peeled the paper off a muffin, unhurried, like the day hadn’t caught up to her yet. “Are you going tonight?”

“I don’t know that I’m invited anymore.”

Levi leaned against the counter with his arms crossed, unhurried, the way a man gets after enough hours watching other people’s worst nights. “Nobody uninvited you. You’re still a contestant. Technically that still makes you her⁠—”

“Don’t,” I said.

“—date,” he finished anyway, grinning, and Becca didn’t even look up, just kicked him lightly under the table, an old married reflex that had nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing.