Page 93 of Pumpkin Spice Promises

“About two years after he died.”

The answer came easily, but the memory didn’t. We’d needed to make payroll. I’d spent three days arguing with myself before listing it online. It sold within twenty-four hours. Meme cried when the buyer loaded it onto a trailer, and I waited until she went inside before doing the same.

Beau crouched near one of the tires. “This one hasn’t moved in six years?”

“Not unless someone moved it without telling me.”

“You would’ve noticed.”

“Probably.”

He ran his palm across the sidewall. “Dry rot isn’t terrible.”

“I don’t know whether that's a good or bad thing.”

“It isn’t bad.” He shifted toward the engine compartment and I watched him work. There was something completely different about Beau when his attention settled onto a machine. At the garage, I had noticed his confidence because he clearly knew what he was doing, but out here without customers, phones, Jax, or Walter pulling his attention in six different directions, it was easier to see.

He slowed down, quietly observing before touching. He opened the hood and examined everything with the patience Pops used to have when one of the cows acted strangely.

I had expected mechanics to be louder somehow, a lot more banging. Definitely more swearing. Pops had certainly done both whenever he worked on equipment.

Beau mostly went quiet.

“What are you thinking about?” His voice pulled me from my thoughts.

“Nothing.”

“You’ve been staring at me.”

“I was staring at the tractor.”

“Conveniently through me?”

I crossed my arms. “You ask too many questions.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because you haven’t improved.”

He returned his attention to the engine, apparently satisfied with whatever answer he’d gotten. I stepped farther inside. My boots left tracks through the dust. Every few feet, something else triggered a memory.

A strand of orange lights.

Pops standing on a ladder while Meme yelled that he was too old to be climbing anything.

A cardboard box filled with carved wooden pumpkins.

Me and Pops sitting on the barn floor painting faces onto them while Blueberry wandered loose behind us and tried eating the brushes.

An old galvanized bucket still had a handwritten label stuck across the side.

CIDER TICKETS

I picked it up. Inside were several strips of faded orange tickets. I hadn’t thought about those in years… During the festival, Pops sold cider tickets for fifty cents each, even after Rosie pointed out nobody carried quarters anymore. Every year she tried to convince him to modernize.

And every year he told her the day Marigold Ranch accepted electronic cider payments was the day he sold the cows and moved to Florida.

“Found something?”