11. Elizabeth
Elizabeth
The farm had finally tipped fully over into the season.
It was full fall, all autumn, so freaking gorgeous I could hardly stand it.
The maples on the ridge had gone past red into that deep wine color they get right before they let go of their leaves, the mornings came in white with frost that didn’t always burn off anymore, and the air down by the stand was thick with the smell of the cider press running daylight to dark.
We’d hung the café lights on the gazebo and tested them one evening, the whole structure flaring gold against the early dark, and half the town had slowed their cars on the county road to look.
Festival weather. The good kind, the kind I’d have bottled and sold if I could, except the whole farm was already mortgaged against a number with November tenth on it, so mostly I tried not to think about that and ran my contestants instead.
The costume round is my favorite part of the whole festival, and I will defend that position against all comers, because there is no faster way to learn the truth about a man than to hand him a costume and watch what he does with his dignity.
Some men fight it. And some men, the rare ones, surrender to it completely and become, for one evening, exactly as ridiculous as joy requires, and those are the men this town takes into its heart and never lets go of.
I had a strong suspicion about which kind Matt Hartford was going to turn out to be, and I was about to find out, because we were holed up in the back room of the farm stand, which is where the festival’s costume fitting happened.
The stand sat where the lane met the road, the first thing you saw turning in off the highway and the last thing you passed leaving—a long, low building my great-grandfather had thrown together out of cedar that had silvered over the decades, with a deep covered porch across the front and a Dutch door whose top half stood open from first pick to last frost.
In season, the porch was a still life of the whole farm.
Crates of pumpkins and pie squash stacked three high, mums in their nursery pots, baskets of the season’s apples, strings of dried corn nailed to the posts, and the long window counter where we sold it all, with the honey lined up behind the glass in rows.
It smelled the way it had smelled my entire life, of cedar and sweet rot and cold apples and the dust that lives in burlap.
Behind the selling floor was the back room, low-ceilinged and crowded, half storage and half everything else—shelving to the rafters stacked with empty baskets and seed trays and the accumulated debris of a hundred Octobers, a wood counter scarred from a century of use, a space heater that lied about its abilities, and the rolling rack of festival costumes that came out of storage every fall like old friends nobody had the heart to retire.
Gwen’s office was through the far door. It was the warmest room on the farm that wasn’t a kitchen, and the most private, which was either very convenient or a genuine problem, depending on who you’d shut the door with.
I had shut the door with Matt Hartford. And now he was standing in the middle of all that cedar and burlap-dust while I advanced on him with a garment bag and the unholy glee of a woman about to test a hypothesis.
“No,” Matt said, looking at the garment bag.
“You haven’t seen it.”
“I can see the shape of it through the bag. But mostly I can sense your unspoken glee. So the answer is no. I already know it.”
“Whatever,” I scoffed. “The theme this year is Harvest Legends.” I unzipped the bag with a flourish I’d been saving up special for this exact moment.
“Folklore. Tall tales. The contestants embody a figure of American agricultural myth, and you, Officer Hartford, are going to be—” I drew it out, the whole magnificent thing, and held it up against him “—Johnny Appleseed.”
He looked at the costume. Brown trousers, a homespun shirt, a burlap sack of felt apples, and the centerpiece, the thing I’d had Donna source carefully from Grandma’s kitchen, the thing that was going to win this town’s entire heart whether he liked it or not—
“That’s a pot,” Matt said. “You want me to wear a pot. On my head.”
“Johnny Appleseed wore a cooking pot as a hat. It’s historically documented.
I mean probably—possibly. The point is the children are going to love it.
Like, who wouldn’t love a man with a pot on his head,” I muttered and settled it on his head before he could mount a defense.
It sat there, dented and earnest and absurd, on top of all that careful competence, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek.
“Oh, that’s good. That’s so good. You have no idea how good that is. ”
“I have some idea.” He reached up and adjusted the pot a half-inch, deadpan, with the gravity of a man squaring his uniform cap, and I lost the fight with my straight face entirely. “You’re enjoying this,” he accused, clearly affronted by my laughter, which was only sixty percent at his expense.
“I am having the best week of my professional life.”
“And if I wear the pot?”
“Then you beat Jude, who is going as Paul Bunyan and has, I am reliably informed, constructed a foam ox to scale.” I watched it work on him, the way I’d known it would. “He’s been telling everyone the ox has articulated knees.”
Something shifted in his face when I said beat Jude.
I’d found this lever, and I was not above pulling it.
The man would not put a pot on his head for me, for the amusement of the children in the crowd, or even for the farm, but he would absolutely put a pot on his head to defeat Jude Barrett in a small-town pageant, because somewhere under all that careful stillness lived a competitive streak I was developing an unwholesome fondness for.
“Articulated knees,” Matt muttered quietly, like a man accepting a mission.
“To scale,” I added with grave emphasis.
“Give me the damn pot.”
“You’re wearing the pot.”
“Then give me the rest of it.”
So, we did the fitting.
And here is where the costume round earned its place as my favorite, because there is a thing that happens when you have to physically arrange a large, careful man into a costume, a thing involving proximity, and I had not adequately prepared for it despite having had several days’ warning and a working knowledge of my own pulse.
I have dressed half the men in this town as scarecrows and lumberjacks and one memorable year as the four seasons, and not once has my heart done anything but keep its own steady time while I pinned a hem.
It is a clinical operation. You are a costumer.
You have pins in your mouth, and a job to do, and the man in front of you is a mannequin who happens to complain.
Matt Hartford was not a mannequin, and my heart, the traitor, knew it.
I had to adjust the shirt across his shoulders, which were wide and muscular.
And that was a problem I’d been refusing to think about since I’d had my hands on one of them at the wedding and could no longer refuse to think about with both my hands on them now, the warmth of him coming through the homespun, the breadth of him I had to reach to cross.
I buttoned the cuffs of the shirt, and he stood there and let me, watching me do it with an expression I couldn’t read and didn’t dare try.
I had to reach up to set the pot at the correct jaunty angle, which put me close enough to count the gray just starting at his temples and catch whatever clean cedar scent he carried around with him under the hay and the felt.
His hands came up to steady me without either of us deciding they should; one warm at my waist while I fussed with the collar, and the back room got very small and very warm and smelled of cut hay and felt apples and him.
I kept up a stream of completely unhinged chatter about historical millinery, because random chatter is the rope I climb out of these moments on and I was climbing for my life.
“—and the thing about the pot, structurally, is that it has to read from the back of the gazebo lawn, which matters for the crowd; you want a silhouette—”
“Elizabeth.”
“—and the apples are felt because real apples are a liability; we learned that the year Ben Barrett went as an orchard and the wasps came, you have never seen a grown man run like—”
“Elizabeth.”
I stopped. He was looking down at me, the pot slightly askew on his head, which should have been ridiculous and was instead doing something complicated and unfair to my breathing, and his hand was still at my waist, and his eyes had gone dark and steady in the low light.
The chatter died in my throat the way it never does, the rope just gone, my hands gone still on his collar.
“You’re nervous,” he said. The man sized up suspects, and he’d been sizing me up for a long time.
“You talk faster when you’re nervous. You did it on the porch.
You did it in the maze with your hands on a ladder.
You’re doing it now.” His thumb moved, once, at my waist, barely, and yet I felt it everywhere.
“What are you nervous about?” His voice was low, growly, and that sound coupled with the way he looked at me scrambled my brain in a way it had never been scrambled before. I couldn’t think.
And the honest answer was you, the honest answer was this, the honest answer was I am standing in a hay-smelling back room falling for a man in a pot and I made him promise not to let me and I am realizing the promise was always for me, I’m the one who can’t afford it, and none of that was going to come out of my mouth, so I did the only thing left when the rope is gone and the truth is too big.
I went up on my toes. Or I started to. I felt myself start to, felt the whole stupid gorgeous gravity of it, his hand tightening at my waist, his head bending, the inch from the pumpkin patch finally closing, the back room holding its breath—
The goat hit the door like a battering ram.
We keep the goats fenced. We are not a chaotic operation, whatever the evidence of any given Tuesday suggests.
But Gwen’s middle kid had been given one job at the petting-zoo pen, and the one job had a gate, and the gate had a latch, and the latch was no match for a Nigerian dwarf goat named Vincent van Goat who had been plotting her freedom since August, the name a decision my niece had made and defended ever since.
The door banged open. Vincent van Goat entered at high speed.
Behind her came the kid, and behind the kid came Gwen hollering, and behind Gwen came the rest of the petting-zoo goats in a woolly bid for liberty, and the moment—the moment I had been a half-inch and one heartbeat from—shattered into pure barnyard chaos.
In other words. No kiss. No freaking kiss. I didn’t know if I should be relieved or pissed.
Matt moved before I did, of course he did, sweeping the tray of felt apples up out of goat range with one arm and scooping the runaway kid clear of the stampede with the other, the pot still somehow on his head, and for a few minutes the back room was nothing but bleating and shrieking and laughing and Gwen hollering a string of threats at children and livestock alike, and Vincent van Goat methodically eating the burlap apple sack right off Matt’s costume while he was too busy saving everyone else to notice. I should have helped.
I mostly stood against the shelving and laughed, the helpless kind, the kind that bends you in half, because the sight of Matt Hartford—the steadiest man in Sweetbriar, the most serious cop alive, the man who checked every lock twice—standing in a crooked cooking pot with a felt apple in one fist and a four-year-old under the other arm and a goat eating his lunch, calmly issuing instructions to a room full of escaped petting zoo like it was a hostage situation, was the funniest thing I had seen in a year.
“You think this is funny,” he said, over the noise.
“I think it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“Catch a goat, Starling.”
“Absolutely not, I’m management.”
By the time we’d restored order and returned the goats to the custody of the state and Gwen had marched her mortified middle child off with a lecture about latches, the moment from before—the half-inch, the held breath, the almost freaking kiss—had been packed away, unspoken, the way I pack everything away.
But it hadn’t evaporated. I could still feel the print of his hand at my waist like a brand under my flannel.
And when he caught my eye across the wreckage, Johnny Appleseed in a dented pot with his apple sack chewed to ruin and hay in his collar, he didn’t look away and laugh it off the way a normal person would.
He just held my eyes, steady, and let me see that he hadn’t forgotten what we’d been a half-inch from either.
“So, um, costume round this weekend. Then we’ll meet again, same time next week,” I said when I could manage words again. “Talent round. You’ll need to actually have a talent.”
“I’ll find one.”
“You’ve got a pot. The bar is low.” I gathered the chewed remains of the apple sack from Vincent van Goat, who had surrendered it without remorse.
“And Hartford—genuinely, for the judging—think about something real. Not a magic trick, not whatever Jude’s doing.
The town can tell when a man’s hiding behind a bit.
” I heard myself say it and felt the irony go down sideways, because if there was a reigning champion of hiding behind a bit in Sweetbriar, she was standing right there holding goat-damaged felt.
“Give them something sincere. They reward sincerity.”
He looked at me a long moment, the pot still crooked on his head, and something moved behind his eyes like he was filing the advice away to use against me later.
“Sincere,” he repeated. “Noted.”
He handed me the last of the few felt apples, and his fingers brushed mine, and held, one beat past where a hand-off ends, the tell, his tell, holding on—and I stood there with my heart going crazy and understood with total clarity that the goat had bought me exactly one week.
That whatever this was, it was coming, the way fall comes, the way the frost comes, inevitable and gold and impossible to fence in.
And that somewhere in the last few weeks, between a barn roof and a rainstorm and a pot, I had stopped wanting to fence it at all.
I walked home smelling of hay and goat, and his clean cedar scent, and I did not make a single joke about any of it to my mother, who noticed that too, the way she notices everything, and wisely, for once, said nothing at all.