The Pumpkin Patch That Filled a School Bus

“Your patch is muddy and buggy, Diane. I just think Brody deserves something nicer this year.”

Courtney said it standing at my kitchen counter with her car keys still in her hand. She did not sit down. She never sat down in my kitchen if she could help it.

I had a pan of apple bars cooling on the stove and a dish towel over my shoulder. I remember that because I kept wiping my hands on it long after they were dry.

“Something nicer,” I said. I could hear my own voice and it sounded calm, which surprised me.

“The place out by the highway. Harvest Hill or whatever it’s called. They have a hay maze and a corn pit and a little train. There’s a gift shop with cider donuts. I already paid online.”

She held up her phone like it was a receipt I needed to see. I didn’t look. I could see the number from where I stood anyway. Twenty-eight dollars a head.

“That’s a lot of money for a pumpkin,” I said, and I said it mildly, because I was trying very hard to say everything mildly.

“It’s not for the pumpkin. It’s for the experience.” She tucked the phone back in her coat. “He’s six. He’ll remember this stuff. I want him to remember it being nice.”

I want to be honest about how that landed. It landed like a slap I had to pretend I didn’t feel.

I have grown pumpkins behind our barn for thirty years. Not a few in a garden corner. Close to an acre, sandy loam on one end and black dirt on the other, Howdens and Jack-o-Lanterns and a row of the warty ones because I like them, plus some white ones for the church ladies who decorate the fellowship hall.

My son Kyle picked his first pumpkin out of that patch when he was two years old. It was bigger than he was. Roger had to carry it to the house while Kyle walked beside him with one hand on it, so he could say he helped.

And Brody, my grandson, had picked one every October of his life. The first year he was four months old and we set him on a pumpkin in a little orange hat and took his picture. That picture is still on my refrigerator. Courtney stood about three feet from it while she talked.

“It’s muddy because it rained,” I said. “It rains in October.”

“It’s muddy every year. Last year he had mud to his knees and I had to throw his jeans away. And there were those beetles all over everything.”

“Cucumber beetles. They don’t bite,” I said, though I knew as I said it that the beetles were not really the point.

“Diane.” She gave me the patient smile she uses, the one I imagine she uses at school with the children who will not sit on their carpet square. “I’m not trying to start anything. I’m just telling you so you don’t plan on it.”

So you don’t plan on it. As if I hadn’t been planning on it since the seed catalog came in January.

“All right,” I said.

She blinked. I think she had come in ready for a fight, and I had not given her one, and she didn’t know where to put her hands.

“Okay,” she said. “Good. Thank you for understanding.”