Elizabeth #3
“So far.” He took the cup. His fingers were warm against mine for exactly one half-second, which my nervous system also logged for later review against my explicit instructions. He glanced at the counter display. “Honey’s almost out.”
“Pumpkin spice does things to people.”
“Mm,” he said, and looked at me a beat longer than the honey conversation strictly required.
Then Becca said, from approximately two feet away where she was absolutely not stocking gum anymore, “So, Matt. Got any plans this fall? Anything fun?”
He looked at his sister the way you look at a dog sitting too calmly next to a torn-open garbage bag.
“No,” he said, slowly.
“Great,” Becca said, beaming. “Great, great, great.”
He left with his coffee and one more nod that I analyzed over the rest of my shift. What did he mean by the nod? Why not say goodbye or see you later like a normal person? Why was nodding so sexy when Matt Hartford did it?
Becca hummed while she worked, and I rang up gas and lotto and four jars of honey, and the whole afternoon had that gold slant to the light that the end of summer gets, when the sun comes in low through the front windows and makes even the propane cage look romantic.
A perfect day. That’s how the universe gets you.
I got back to the farm at six with three of Aunt Donna’s leftover burritos that she hid for me and the Harvest Festival folder.
The light had reached the hour when the whole hillside turns to honey—the corn maze blazing at its tips, the maples on the ridge half-lit, the pumpkins glowing in their rows like the field had swallowed strings of lights. Grandma was out in the pumpkin patch.
This was not unusual. Iris Starling walked her pumpkins every evening the way other people wound a clock—down the rows in her barn coat, tapping the big ones with her boot, talking to them or to the bees or to her grandmother, depending who you asked.
I parked by the farm stand and walked out to meet her between the rows.
“Hey, Grandma,” I called out.
She wasn’t listening. She stood very still between the rows with her hand out, bent slightly over, resting on a pumpkin that wasn’t tall enough to lean on.
Something in me dropped before I knew why.
My grandmother is never still—she walks her rows, she taps her gourds, her hands are always doing the next thing—and that stillness hit my stomach like a missed stair, a cold little lurch that got there a full second ahead of any thought.
My feet were already moving. My brain hadn’t caught up enough to tell them to.
“Grandma?”
“I’m fine,” she said, which is what every woman in my family says in place of sounding a fire alarm.
And then she took one step, and the step went wrong—sideways, soft, as if the ground had quietly moved on her—and I dropped the folder and got my arm around her before the next one, and the burritos hit the dirt, and the whole golden evening tipped over.
She was conscious. Conscious, I repeated in a loud internal voice—conscious, talking, complaining, which on the Iris Starling scale of medical emergencies meant we were at maybe a four.
She said it was nothing. She said she’d stood up too fast, never mind that she’d been standing for an hour.
She said, while I steered her toward my car with my heart going like a rabbit, that she didn’t need a hospital; she needed dinner, and I said, “Great news, I brought burritos. They’re in the dirt back there; we’ll grab them on the way,” because apparently I do bits during emergencies. Good to know. New data.
I got her in the passenger seat. I buckled her in like she was one of my sister Gwen’s kids—Gwen had three, and buckling them was a contact sport—and Grandma let me, and that scared me more than the stumble, because Iris Starling does not let you do anything.
I called my mother, and she met us at the end of the lane, climbing into the back seat with her face arranged into the calm one, the one I’d inherited from the hard-headed, stubborn Starling women who preceded me, and I pulled out onto the road toward Sweetbriar General with the sun going down red behind the hills like the whole town was blushing about something.
“You’re both being dramatic,” Grandma said. “I have pumpkins to check. I still have to tend to the bees.”
“The pumpkins will keep,” Mom said.
“It’s the bees I’d worry about,” I joked. “They knew before we did. You said so yourself this morning. Probably they’re unionizing.”
Grandma laughed, a small one, and patted my hand on the gearshift, and her hand was cold, and I kept both of mine on the wheel after that so nobody would see that they were shaking.
Fall is my favorite season. I tell everyone that. I tell them it’s the smell and the light and the kettle corn, and that’s all true.
But here’s the part I don’t say at the register. I love fall because it’s proof that an ending can be the most beautiful thing in the whole year. Everything letting go at once, and doing it in gold.
I just never thought to ask what that would mean in a season when I wasn’t ready to let go of anything.