Page 21 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

My plan was to win efficiently and feel nothing. I had decided that if I had to be dragged into this, I would treat it like a tactical problem—optimal bite size, minimal motion, no wasted effort—and I would win, because I do not enter things to lose, and I would do it with my dignity bolted down tight, and then it would be over.

Elizabeth caught my eye from the steps just before she started us. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me, and tipped her head a fraction, and there was a dare in it, and under the dare something gentler, something like come on, let go, just this once, I dare you.

“Contestants ready,” Elizabeth called. “On your marks. Get set⁠—”

I abandoned the plan.

I don’t entirely know why. I’d like to say it was strategy, but it was the exact opposite of strategy. The horn went, and three hundred people roared, and I put my face in a pumpkin pie in front of the entire town of Sweetbriar, and somewhere around the third enormous graceless mouthful, whipped cream up both eyebrows and filling on my chin and absolutely no dignity remaining anywhere in the county, something came loose in my chest that I think had been bolted down since I was about fourteen years old.

I lost. I lost badly. I lost to Jude Barrett, who inhaled that pie like a man possessed, like four potatoes’ worth of preparation a night was a legit strategy, and came up roaring with his arms over his head and filling in his beard while Harper screamed something at him that was either congratulations or a threat. But I came up second, and I came up laughing—really laughing, the kind that takes your whole body, the kind I could not have produced on command if you’d paid me, the kind I hadn’t done in so long that the muscles for it felt borrowed.

I had spent my life being the one who watched. The one at the edge with his back to the wall and his eye on the door, who made sure everyone else got to have the party, who held the perimeter so the people he loved could be careless inside it. I had never once been inside it myself. And I had told myself for so long that this was who I was—the watcher, the holder, the man at the edge—that I’d forgotten it had ever been a choice.

And then a woman in a knit cap had tipped her head at me and dared me to put my face in a pie, and I’d done it, and the perimeter had held without me for one single morning, and the sky had not fallen, and people had laughed with me instead of safely behind the wall I stood at. I was inside it. For the first time I could remember, I was inside the party instead of guarding it, and what I felt, under the pie and the noise, was so large and so simple that it embarrassed me.

I sat there covered in pie, laughing, and across the lawn I caught Becca on her feet with both hands over her mouth and her eyes shining, and Levi beside her grinning like he’d won something, and Harper howling, and Jude offering me a hand up like we were brothers-in-arms instead of rivals, which I took, because I was apparently a person who took offered hands now.

And Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was doubled over the hosts’ table, laughing so hard she’d lost the megaphone, one hand flat on the table holding herself up, and when she came up for air she found me across all that noise and that wreckage of pie, and for one second the festival fell away and it was just the two of us looking at each other across a laughing crowd, her face open and bright and undefended, mine probably ridiculous, and she mouthed three words at me.

You let go.

I had. She’d seen it. She’d dared me to, and I’d done it, and she’d caught me doing it, and instead of feeling cornered I felt—seen, in a way that didn’t sting, which was so unfamiliar I didn’t have a file for it at all.

Donna came around with a roll of paper towels and a look of deep maternal satisfaction. June held her phone up and read the verdict off. “Jude Barrett, and it’s not close; the meter almost cracked. The cheer that went up for him was loud enough to start a small avalanche somewhere on the mountain. Iris, as the nearest thing the table had to an authority, banged her quilt-wrapped hand on the arm of her chair and ratified the phone’s verdict in a voice that brooked no appeal, then pointed a regal finger at me and added, “Second place ate that pie like he meant it.”

And the crowd cheered that too. Cheered second place. Cheered a cop with whipped cream in his eyebrows and pie on his collar, a warm rolling swell of it that had no business being that loud for a man who’d lost, and as the crowd started breaking up, people kept finding me—a hand on my shoulder, a nod across the hay bales, an old-timer I’d once helped dig out of a snowed-in driveway gripping my arm on his way past and saying “Good to see, son. Good to see,” without ever specifying what was, exactly, good to see.

Aunt Aggie intercepted me before I made it three steps toward the spigot.

My great-aunt is a small, sun-cured, entirely unsentimental woman who runs the Riverside Pines Campground, where Becca lives with Levi, with a firm hand and the town’s wagering with a firmer one, and she came at me through the crowd with her ledger under one arm and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, looking like a woman preparing to dispute a bill.

“You cost me four dollars, Matthew.”

“Hello, Aunt Aggie.”

“Four dollars. I had you to win. Not place—win.” She stopped in front of me and looked up at me, at the whipped cream, the pie on my collar, the grin I still hadn’t gotten back under control. “And then you go soft in the back stretch, laughing like a loon while the fireman runs you down. Unserious. Undisciplined.” She sniffed. “I want my money’s worth in the costume round.”

There is no point apologizing to Aggie and no point defending yourself either, so I did what Becca and I learned to do a long time ago, which is stand there and let the weather pass. When we were kids, she made sure there was somewhere we could be that wasn’t home.

She was still looking at me. The dispute had gone out of her face, and something older and quieter had come up under it, and she reached out with one weathered thumb and swiped a smear of whipped cream off my jaw like I was nine years old.

“Look at you,” she said, half to herself. “Pie on your face in front of the whole town, grinning like a summer at the Pines.” She shook her head slowly. “I’ve been trying to lose four dollars on you for years, Matthew. Best money I ever spent. Proud of you, honey.”

And then, before it could become anything either of us would have to acknowledge, she flipped her glasses down out of her hair and onto her nose and was all business again. “Costume round. I’m putting ten on you, so whatever that Starling girl has planned, commit to it. Don’t embarrass me twice.” And she stomped off into the crowd to collect her debts, ledger out, glasses flashing, and I stood there with pie drying on my collar and understood that I had just been told, in fluent Aggie, that she loved me and was proud of me and had been waiting years to watch me be happy.

Four dollars. Cheap at the price.

I cleaned up at the spigot by the stand, cold water and a borrowed towel, and I was wiping the last of the whipped cream out of my eyebrows when Elizabeth found me, still bright with it, still half laughing, the clipboard for once nowhere in sight.

“Officer Hartford,” she said. “I have to be honest. I had you pegged for a man who’d eat a pie like he was filling out a report.”

“That was the plan.”

“What happened to the plan?”

I looked at her. The whole bright morning was behind her, the maples and the smoke and the crowd breaking up into clumps of neighbors, the festival she’d built turning all around us, and she was looking up at me flushed and grinning and close, and I thought about telling her the truth, which was you happened to the plan, which was you dared me and I have apparently spent my whole life waiting for somebody to dare me, which was a great deal more than a man says at a spigot with pie in his eyebrows.