Page 8 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“Oh—and don’t go by the Stop & Go looking for the entry list today,” she said. “Elizabeth’s out. Donna closed early.”

There are things you learn taking statements for a living. One of them is that the sentence people toss over their shoulder on the way out the door is the one they came to say, or the one they almost didn’t. Another is the difference between out meaning errands and out meaning something happened, and you can hear it; the word comes out one notch too careful.

“Out,” I said.

There was a version of this where I nodded, said huh, and went back to my paperwork, and Becca left without a single thing to report. That version required me not to care where Elizabeth Starling was and not to let my sister see that I cared, and I could manage exactly one of those on a good day. This was not a good day. She was standing in the doorway with her face set to casual, which meant she’d baited the hook on purpose and was already counting the seconds till I bit.

I bit.

“Out where?”

Becca paused. “Her grandmother had a dizzy spell. They took her to Sweetbriar General—she’s okay, they kept her for tests, it’s all fine.” She watched me the way she does, which is to say, the way I do. “She should be home now. I’ve been texting Elizabeth, but she keeps saying she doesn’t need anything and made about three different jokes about it.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” Becca said, left, and did not tell me to do anything about it, which, from her, was a tactic.

I worked the rest of the shift. I clocked out at six, drove home, stood in my kitchen, and ate dinner over the sink like a man being filmed for a documentary about how to be boring.

At Becca’s wedding, a woman in a green dress had asked me what I wanted, and I’d gone room to room in myself and found everything squared away, and tonight every room I checked had Elizabeth in it.

It was not my place to check on her. The Starlings had each other, in quantity. Elizabeth Starling had a mother and a sister and two aunts and a bunch of cousins, and what she had from me was a coffee order and one dance and whatever that half-second yesterday had been before I’d left. Men do not show up at hospitals on the strength of a half-second. There was no call to take. Nobody had dialed my number.

I washed the one plate. I checked the locks, both doors, out of order just to prove I could.

And then I got in my truck, turned left on Main past the dark Stop & Go, out the county road with the radio low—and if my drive happened to run past the white sign for Sweetbriar Starling Farm, that was geography, not a decision.

The Big House was lit up late, every window downstairs bright against the dark fields, the way houses light up when nobody in them can sleep. The little house by the pumpkin patch had one light on, in the kitchen.

I slowed down. I didn’t stop. There was no reason to stop.

But at the end of the farm’s fence line, where the wildflower field went gray in my headlights and the hive boxes stood in their crooked row, I took one last look in the rearview mirror, occupants accounted for.

Chapter 3

Elizabeth

Hospital waiting rooms are designed by people who have never waited for anything.

I know this because I spent four hours in the one at Sweetbriar General studying it like there’d be a test later. The chairs bolted into rows so you couldn’t pull them into a circle, the TV up in the corner playing muted home-renovation shows about people whose entire lives were currently fine, the vending machine humming in the alcove waiting for me to buy my next dose of caffeine—It was ours, that machine. Of course it was. I’d have known the model anywhere—I’d restocked it a hundred times, the lobby route, second Tuesday of the month—and there was something almost unbearable about standing in a hospital waiting on news of my grandmother and being watched over by one of our own machines, faithfully humming, fully stocked, doing its small Starling job of being there when somebody needed it.

“The vending machine has Cool Ranch,” I reported, dropping back into the chair beside my mother. “But the row is jammed. There’s a bag just hanging there. Living on the edge of the coil.”

“Mm,” said Mom, which is Grandma’s mm, one generation down and slightly softer. She had her coffee untouched on her knee and her eyes on the double doors where they’d taken her mother, and her face was artificially calm, the look we gave each other in this family like a tool we all shared

They’d taken Grandma back fast—faster than I liked, fast in the way that means the intake nurse saw something to worry about on the first pass—and then the doors had closed.

So I kept talking, and Mom said mm, and somewhere within the hour the family started arriving, because that’s the other thing about this family. Bad news travels at the speed of Aunt Donna.

She came through the sliding doors first, in her Stop & Go kitchen apron, which meant she’d left mid-prep for the morning, carrying a cooler. And the cooler deserved its own moment. My grandmother had been rushed to the hospital, the outcome was unknown, and Donna had packed a cooler. Donna is the second oldest of the Starling women, and her entire understanding of a catastrophe is that it makes people hungry, and somebody has to be ready. She hugged my mother without a word, kissed the top of my head, and started setting up a buffet on the bolted-down chairs as if the waiting room were simply a venue she’d booked.

Aunt Tiffany was four minutes behind her, which probably annoyed her; she liked to arrive first. Tiffany was the youngest of the three sisters—Donna fed you, Tiffany deployed you. She came in already on the phone, a legal pad under one arm, wearing the reading glasses that lived on her head like a tiara. By the time she’d crossed the room, she had confirmed someone to cover the farm stand in the morning, rescheduled Grandma’s hair appointment, and said the words “no, next week is fine, this is a medical situation, Carol” in the voice she used on the school board.

Tiffany ran logistics for the whole family—the farm stand schedule, the vending route, the suppliers, and, unofficially, the lives of everyone within phone reach. Her daughter Delilah—sixteen and my one true apprentice in the art of sarcasm—had texted me four times already, offering to skip school and run the corn maze ticket booth solo, each message more legally specific than the last. Her little brother Beau had sent one drawing of an ambulance with get better on it, misspelled, perfect. I’d downplayed the seriousness of Grandma’s situation so they wouldn’t freak out. We could all freak out together later if it became necessary.

And then Gwen, my sister, hair wet from the shower she was in when I called her. “What do we know?” Gwen said, sitting down on my other side, taking my hand without negotiating about it. Gwen hugs like Mom and organizes like Tiffany and looks like all of us—the auburn, the freckles, the attitude. As the only Starling who’d married aside from Grandma, she had a different last name and three kids who carried it. She also had the divorce that came with it, which the family discussed exactly never unless Gwen brought it up first. She worked the back office of the whole operation alongside my mother—Mom kept the books, the actual ledgers and payroll and the longhand math she trusted over any machine, and Gwen ran everything around them, the invoices and the orders and the supplier calls and the hundred small fires a day that a farm and a store and a laundromat and a vending route throw off, all of it managed from the cramped office off the farm stand with a kid or three underfoot when they weren’t at school or with their dad. Between the two of them, they were the reason the numbers stayed numbers and not chaos, which also meant Gwen and my mother knew, to the dollar, the true shape of the hole the farm was in—the same shape the rest of us had been circling all summer.

“Dizzy spell in the pumpkin patch. She was talking the whole drive. Complaining by the time we hit the parking lot.” I rationed out the rest. “They took her back quick. They’re running tests.”