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Pumpkin Guts

Pumpkin Guts

By seven the Willow Inn's front parlor was full of people who had come to admire Caitlin's decorations and were doing a splendid job of standing directly in front of them. A paper ghost had attached itself to the back of a man's coat and was touring the room with him. Children had lined up at the mantel to argue over which of the lantern's little carved figures was winning the race. Ms. Hawthorne went round and round with a tray of cider, pink to the ears and happier than she'd admit, stopping every few feet to rescue a toffee from a small hand before it went into the fire, then losing track of which cups she'd filled and starting over.

Caitlin had been watching the parlor door since a quarter to seven.

She had not meant to. She had meant to stand by the cider looking like a woman with a full and satisfying life, and instead her eyes kept going to the door every time it opened, and every time it was somebody's uncle, and every time her stomach dropped a little and then climbed back up, and she'd started to feel faintly seasick.

"He's not late, you know," Maggie said at her elbow. "It's barely seven."

"I'm not looking for him. I'm looking at the door. It's a nice door. Ms. Hawthorne had it refinished."

"Then you're really into that door."

Caitlin took a cup of cider off the tray before Maggie could take the last one. Maggie had come as a detective out of an old paperback, in a plaid skirt with a magnifying glass on a ribbon around her neck. The glass was far too small to be any use for evidence and exactly the right size for examining Caitlin's face, which Maggie did now, lifting it with great ceremony.

"You have lipstick on your tooth."

Caitlin clapped a hand over her mouth. Maggie lowered the glass.

"I don't. Do I? You're a horrible person, and I'm remembering this next time you want me to cover the front desk so you can go to the dentist."

"You've known I was horrible for years. You keep me around anyway."

That was true, and it softened Caitlin a little, which was annoying. Maggie tucked the ribbon into her collar and looked at the door too, not even pretending otherwise.

It was perfectly reasonable, Caitlin told herself, to keep an eye out for late guests at a party she had spent all day decorating. That the particular guest she was keeping an eye out for was a man she'd drawn a small pumpkin for on a floor plan, and that she'd spent the rest of the afternoon wondering whether he'd taken the arrow as a joke, was neither here nor there. It had been a joke. It had also been a map to her, and she'd known that when she drew it. She drank her cider too fast and burned her tongue for the second time that day.

I'll tell you how she looked, since she won't. She'd put on the red dress. It was a gown from a theater company's costume sale, with a red velvet bodice and a skirt wide enough to take out an unwary ankle, and a long row of hooks down the back that Maggie had done up in the upstairs bathroom while delivering a running commentary on Caitlin's life choices. Her hair was up, or had been at six-thirty, according to Maggie, who is not what I'd call a reliable witness. She looked like a woman in a painting who'd stepped out of the frame to get a snack. I'd have cried if I'd been there to see it. I'd have blamed the cider.

The door opened. A family came through first, and then a man stepped aside to hold the door for them and came in after, and it was him.

He'd come as something in a dark tailcoat, with a white cravat tied with great care and not much skill, and his sketchbook was under his arm, because of course it was. He stopped on the threshold with his hand still on the door and looked around the crowded room, over the heads of the children and the ghost on the man's coat, and found her. His face changed when he did. It wasn't much. His eyebrows went up a fraction and his mouth let go of something it had been holding. Letting the door close behind him, he started across the room.

Caitlin stood very still with her cider.

There it was. The thing she'd watched happen to other women at this party for years, from behind a stack of used paper plates: a person crossing a room because she'd asked him to. Her heart went hard and fast, and her hands went cold around the cup, and underneath the thrill was something she hadn't expected at all, a small frightened ache, as if she'd been holding her breath for years and had only now noticed.

I had waited a long time to see that. I may have helped it along; I've never been sure. I'll say no more about it.

Maggie's magnifying glass came up. Caitlin pushed it down without looking.

Liam reached them. His eyes went to the dress, briefly, and then back up to her face and stayed there, and she felt that look land everywhere at once.

"You found it," she said. "Was the arrow helpful? Be honest, because Maggie said the arrow was too much, and I said an arrow is never too much, people get lost in this house all the time. Well. Not lost. Sidetracked."

"I thought about checking the kitchen first."

"That would have been smart, honestly. That's where she keeps the good food, and there's a cat on the door, so you'd know you were somewhere important."

"I followed the drawing." He tapped the sketchbook under his arm. "Reliable local source."

Maggie made a noise into her cider. Caitlin introduced them before she could improve on it. Liam shook Maggie's hand, and Maggie's eyes went from his cravat to Caitlin's face and back again. They had worked the front desk together at the library for six years. Maggie knew what Caitlin's polite voice sounded like, and she knew perfectly well that this was not it.

"An artist?" Maggie asked, looking him up and down.

"A phantom artist," Liam said.

Caitlin looked at his entirely visible face, then at the sketchbook. "You've really committed to the artist half. You brought actual supplies. And the phantom half is just your face, out in the open, which I'm not complaining about, for the record. I'm only noting it."

"The phantom part didn't make it."

"You could have come in through a wall. Ms. Hawthorne would've sold tickets. I'd have bought one. I'd have bought two and made Maggie hold the second."

He glanced over at the mantel, where their hostess was prying a toffee out of a small fist and replacing it with a napkin and an apology. "She'd bill me for the wall."

He smiled then, small and quick, and Caitlin felt it all the way down. She had been braced for the focused face he made when he drew, or for politeness, a little distant, because he was here for work, and a party was only work with cider in it. This Liam had put on an absurd cravat and tied it himself, badly, for a party full of strangers. She wanted to pull it loose and see what happened to his face. That was a terrible thing to be thinking with her best friend standing right there, and she knew it, and she thought it anyway, and her cheeks went hot enough that she was grateful for the fire.

As for the costume, it was a terrible costume. I loved it.

"Pumpkins are in the side parlor," Maggie said brightly. "I hear they need adult supervision."

"The pumpkins?" Liam asked.

"The adults." She was gone into the crowd before Caitlin could tell her that detectives were supposed to be subtle.

Across the room, Ms. Hawthorne was waving at Caitlin with a ladle. She had a carving table to run and a houseful of guests who had taken the instruction to make a face on a pumpkin as a challenge to their knowledge of anatomy. Caitlin set down her cup and took Liam through to the side parlor. He came easily, following the swing of her skirt through a knot of guests. The room smelled of cut pumpkin and the hot cider on the sideboard. Paper bats hung over tables covered in newspaper, with a bowl set beside each for the seeds. The children had other plans for the seeds.

One flew past Caitlin's shoulder and landed in Liam's hair.

He stopped dead. "Is this part of it?"

"Hold still, you've got a seed in your hair. That's the kids being friendly. They only throw them at people they like. Or that's what I tell myself."

She reached up and picked it out of a dark strand near his temple. His head tipped toward her hand, only a little, before she took it away, and she felt that tilt in her own chest. She held the seed up so he could see the evidence and dropped it in the nearest bowl, and her fingertips went on buzzing where they'd almost touched his skin.

Ms. Hawthorne arrived, breathless, holding out a fistful of blunt scoops. "There's room for both of you at the big one. Oh, Liam, you look very handsome, I nearly didn't know you. Caitlin, the Pruitt boy has a knife, would you, when you've a minute, only I've got the cider on." She was already turning. "The big one. By the window."

The big one was not a pumpkin so much as a boulder that had been painted orange.

"Did somebody grow that on purpose?" Caitlin said.

"You'll have to cooperate," Ms. Hawthorne called back over her shoulder, and Caitlin couldn't tell whether she'd planned this or simply run out of chairs. With Ms. Hawthorne it could honestly go either way, and she'd never tell you which.

Liam set his sketchbook on a shelf above the cider. The pumpkin had a hard lump on one side and a lid somebody else had cut at a slant and then abandoned. Caitlin put her hand on the stem and showed him where to lift. The lid stuck. They pulled together, and it came away with a wet sucking sound that made the little girl at the next chair cheer.

"You have an audience," she told him.

"I hope they have low standards."

"They cheered because you opened a lid. I hung bats all afternoon and nobody cheered for me once, so, you know. You're ahead."

They dug in. Her scoop came up with a clump of seeds that she flung onto the newspaper, and his hit the lump inside and skidded off it. He studied the pumpkin, then turned it so the lopsided side faced him.

"We'll put the face here," he said. "The lump can be a nose."

"Of course you'd give it a nose. I was going to hide the lump under a hat, which, now that I hear myself say it, is exactly what I do with my hair, so don't read into that."

"I like the lump."

She looked at him too long. She knew she was doing it and couldn't seem to stop. Even the pumpkin had turned into something personal.

He braced the shell while she scraped. Their scoops clacked together inside it.

"You take the left," she said.

"My left or yours?"

"The pumpkin's left."

"It doesn't have a face yet. It doesn't have a left."

"You're the artist, so give it a temporary face. Draw one in the air or something, I don't care, I only need to know which side I'm scraping before we end up with a pumpkin that's all nose."

He drew a quick line in the air with his scoop and reached in again, and their handles crossed and had to be untangled while the little girl offered detailed advice on technique. Caitlin gave up on the scoop and went in with her hand, the way she'd done it since she was small enough to kneel on a chair to reach the newspaper. The strings were cold and slippery around her fingers. Liam reached in at the same moment, and their knuckles met in the middle of the pumpkin.

Everything in her went quiet.

It was a ridiculous place to be touched for the first time. It was cold and wet and smelled of squash, and there were seeds, and a child three feet away was narrating. None of that seemed to matter to her body, which had decided that the whole evening now lived in the backs of four knuckles. His hand shifted, carefully, making room for hers instead of taking it away. His fingertip found the side of hers and stayed there while they worked a fistful of seeds loose together, and she forgot to breathe and then had to do it all at once.

"Teamwork," she said, and it came out lower than she'd meant.

"We might be done by midnight."

"Oh, you're an optimist, I didn't have you down as an optimist, I had you down as one of those people who reads the last page first to make sure nobody dies."

He looked at her. His hand stayed beside hers until the strings slid loose, and then they dumped the whole slippery mess into the bowl together. There were seeds on his cravat. She saw them and did nothing about them, because if she started tidying that costume, she did not trust herself to know where to stop.

Maggie appeared at the edge of the table with a clean towel. Her eyes went to their hands, which were still touching over the bowl. Caitlin took the towel with her free hand. Maggie's face went politely, professionally blank, which was the least convincing expression she had worn all night.

"Thanks," Caitlin said.

"Sure. You two looked busy."

Liam let go of the seeds. Caitlin wiped her hands with great concentration, because there was no dignified way to argue with that while wearing pumpkin to the wrists. Maggie headed for the sideboard but turned back once to check Caitlin's face, and Caitlin stuck her tongue out at her, and Maggie nearly walked into Ms. Hawthorne and a whole tray of cider.

"Should I ask?" Liam said.

"She'll tell you without being asked. She tells everybody everything. She once told a patron his library card photo looked like a hostage picture. So please, I'm begging you, don't encourage her."

He took a pencil from his pocket, checked the point, and drew a crooked grin on a scrap of newspaper, one that suited the lump, and then a stern straight mouth beside it. Caitlin pointed at the grin. He turned the paper toward her and waited to hear why.

"That one looks like it knows why we're making fools of ourselves," she said.

He added a little notch at the corner of the drawn mouth. "Does it?"

She ought to be able to answer a question about produce. He watched the pencil mark and gave her all the time she needed, and what she wanted to say was that she had come to this table because he was at it, and that seemed too plain and too true to dress up. She touched the paper beside his hand.

"Yes," she said.

Someone at the next table called out for help with a lid, and Caitlin went, because she knew how to handle the knives and because she needed three steps and a breath. When she came back, Liam had drawn the grin straight onto their pumpkin in pencil. It wasn't for his article. It was for the silly thing they'd started together, and seeing that did something to her she didn't have a name for. He handed her the little knife. She cut while he held the shell steady, going slow around the notch, because she had seen plenty of pumpkins at this party lose a tooth to one careless turn, and they ended up with a lopsided face that got better the farther back you stood.

"We might scare the kids," he said.

"Then we win Halloween, and I want a ribbon, and I want it on the mantel where everybody can see it, because the last ribbon anybody gave me was for a summer reading chart." The little girl beside them saw the finished face and burst out laughing, and Caitlin laughed with her, helplessly, until she had to lean on the table. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Liam take his sketchbook down from the shelf. She assumed he was going to fix the mouth. She was busy stopping the little girl from grabbing a knife by the blade, and when she looked back, the book was on the shelf again.

Ms. Hawthorne came through collecting finished pumpkins for the parlor mantel. She turned theirs to find its best side and carried it off to join the others. The lantern sat above them all, its brass gone dark and warm in the firelight. A child reached across the mantel for a toffee, and for a moment his sleeve shaded one of the glass panes, and when he dropped his arm the light slid across the little carved figures, and they looked, from where Caitlin stood, as though they were running toward each other.

She had seen that trick from that angle a hundred times. She watched it anyway, and could not have told you why her throat was tight.

The little girl asked whether the lantern could tell which pumpkin belonged to who. "Only if somebody writes the names underneath," Caitlin told her. The girl looked disappointed, then asked for a pencil. Caitlin gave her one.

Liam had gone to wash the pumpkin off his hands. She found him in the hall, where Ms. Hawthorne was steering him toward a towel with one hand and straightening his cravat with the other, the way she did to anyone under fifty who stood still near her, and she caught herself smiling at the two of them like a fool. Maggie stepped up close enough that only Caitlin could hear.

"You left your hand in there," Maggie said.

"I was getting the seeds out."

"For a long time."

"It was a complicated pumpkin. It had a lot going on inside. Structurally."

"Uh-huh." Maggie glanced down the hall at Liam, then at the sketchbook she was holding against her side. "He left this where the cider could get it."

It was Liam's sketchbook. A loose page stuck out near the back. Maggie slid it free and put it into Caitlin's hand.

"You should probably give that back," she said. "In person."

Caitlin looked down.

In a few quick lines he had caught her at the carving table with her head thrown back laughing, one elbow up, pumpkin smeared across her other hand. Her mouth was open and her face was wide open, and there wasn't a trace of the librarian voice in it anywhere. He'd drawn her leaning toward someone just past the edge of the page.

She knew who'd been standing there.

She didn't look like that. Nobody had ever drawn her looking like that. She stood in the hall with the paper in her hand and felt her eyes go hot and her chest go tight, and for a second she couldn't tell whether she wanted to laugh or cry or find him and kiss him in front of the whole party, and it frightened her a little that all three seemed possible.

The towel Ms. Hawthorne gave Liam was white, and he'd ruined a corner of it by the time he got back to the table, where Caitlin was standing with a loose sheet of paper in her hand. He knew the paper. Maggie stood at her shoulder holding his sketchbook.

He had drawn Caitlin while she laughed at the pumpkin's face, and he'd meant to tuck the page away before she noticed. Maggie had found a more direct approach.

"That's mine," he said to her.

Maggie handed over the book. "I rescued it from the cider."

"And the loose page?"

"It needed rescuing too." She took a cup off the sideboard and gave Caitlin a look he couldn't read from where he stood. "Excuse me."

He waited until she was lost among the guests. Caitlin was still holding the drawing. The paper had bent a little under her thumb. She wasn't hiding it. He reached out and touched the free corner without pulling, and the page stayed there between them, and his heart was going faster than the situation called for. He'd shown people his work for ten years. Nobody had ever held a drawing of his like this, as if it might go off.

"I should've asked before I drew you," he said.

"You didn't ask the pumpkin either. You drew right on its face, with a pencil, in front of a child. I'm pretty sure that violates something."

"The pumpkin's not going to sue."

"I might. I know exactly where the law books are. Back corner, by the bathroom. Nobody ever touches them. I'd have the whole section to myself."

She looked at the sketch again. The lines were rough. Her hair had come out of its pins, and he'd gone over the angle of her shoulder twice, trying to get the turn toward him. He could have pointed out everything that was wrong with it. That would have been easier than telling her why he'd drawn it.

"You can keep it," he said. "If you want."

"Were you planning to throw it away? Because if you were, I'd like to be told, and I'd like to know exactly what was wrong with my elbow."

"No."

It came out too fast. He heard it, and so did she. She looked up, and the corner of her mouth started to curve, and Liam, who had spent a year being careful about what he let people see, decided in that moment to stop.

He held the page where she could see it. "I wanted to get the way you laughed."

"At your pumpkin?"

"At me, I think."

"I can laugh at you and the pumpkin at the same time. I've got range." She dropped her voice and spoke to the page instead of to him: "Mostly I was having fun. With you."

She touched the corner of the drawing, and the small movement brought her fingers close to his again. Around them guests were carrying finished pumpkins through to the parlor. Somebody called for another bowl. Ms. Hawthorne went by with a small boy by the hand, cheerfully steering him away from a table of knives while telling him about a boy she'd known fifty years ago who had carved a pumpkin to look like the mailman. The party roared on a few feet away. Caitlin was looking at a drawing he had made because she laughed and he'd wanted to keep it, and she looked, he thought, the way he felt, which was a little unsteady and very glad.

She kept the page, holding it by the edges so the graphite wouldn't rub off on her dress. His sketchbook was under his arm. He could have asked her to show him another room. He wanted to hear her talk without half of Glensford listening.

"Can we get away from everybody for a few minutes?" he asked.

Her eyes dropped to the cravat, then came back up to his. "Is this so you can draw me again? Because I should warn you I'm terrible at holding still. Ask anybody. Actually, don't ask Maggie."

"I can put the book down."

"Okay. That's a serious offer from a phantom artist. You've had that thing under your arm all night. You had it there when you shook Maggie's hand. I figured it was glued on."

He took the sketchbook out from under his arm and set it on the shelf beside the parlor door. "There."

She looked at it. For a moment he thought she might want to stay here among her friends, where things were easy, and he kept his hands at his sides and let her think. She looked past him toward the parlor, where the fire lit up the row of carved pumpkins and the lantern above them. A guest crossed in front of the mantel, and the lantern's glass brightened as she moved away. Caitlin watched the light a moment longer before she turned back to him.

"Yes," she said.

He left the sketchbook on the shelf. Before he could offer his hand, she had taken it. Her fingers slid between his, still cool from washing, and something in his chest that had been clenched since spring let go all at once. She led him past the last carving table toward the quiet end of the side parlor. Behind them the guests carried their pumpkins into the parlor, and a child demanded another turn with the knife.