Page 14 of Let’s Give ‘Em Pumpkin to Talk About

Josh replied with a sheepish smile. “Most nights one of us is cooking for the other. Your repartee is similarly acidic. How’s your appetite?”

Maybe if she could muster a fraction of the cheer Josh seemed to radiate effortlessly, she and Stu could share a meal like a wholesome sitcom family.

No, that was bullshit. If there was anyone she could unleash her unadulterated self on, it should be her own father. “Surely the old man has told you about how Foxes have one hollow leg for food and the other for booze.”

“Then he tells me I have a hollow head.”

Sadie laughed to ease the way for her embarrassing truth. “I don’t like squash.”

Josh waved his free hand. “I know people always say this, but you probably haven’t had it cooked well. It can be so watery and flavorless when prepared poorly.”

She did, in fact, not like summer squash even if prepared by a chef at a Michelin three-star restaurant.

She’d tried the courgette at such a restaurant in fact, a French place in Santa Monica.

It had not changed her mind. “Sorry,” he said.

“Please forget I said that. It’s my knee-jerk reaction.

You grew up with this stuff. Obviously you know whether you like it or not.

Do you like eggplant parmesan by any chance? ”

Was the truest way to honor a vegetable to bread it and deep-fry it and cover it in cheese? Probably. “That I do.”

“I’ve got leftovers and if you want them, they’re all yours. I make a mean eggplant parm sub with roasted garlic rolls from the farmers market.”

Irresistible, considering her dinner would have most likely been some microwave popcorn and a handful of baby carrots. “I’ll take you up on that, thanks.”

“Keep me company while I cook?” he asked with a sheepish smile, sliding his long fingers through his hair.

Sadie’s eyes flicked to those fingers, envious of people who could rake their hair flirtatiously.

Hers was pin-straight and fine, so she not only admired the way he stroked his shiny locks, she felt the urge to follow in their wake with her own fingers.

Instead she nodded and followed him into the house through the back door.

Josh clearly liked company, and he liked being company, even with someone as caustic as Stu.

Sadie always thought her dad was a solitary creature like her.

Someone who tended his solitude in the pumpkin patch and in the woods.

One place he controlled and the other controlled him.

Something had shifted—either she was wrong or Stu had begun letting people like Josh in.

Sadie tended her solitude with her textiles, her world. She couldn’t imagine ceding control to something else. Not to mention, that control over her art felt increasingly tenuous. If she couldn’t find a new direction for her work, the clients seeking commissioned work would dictate it for her.

Maybe that wasn’t the worst outcome. She could work like hell for a few years, making enough money to free herself up to do whatever she wanted.

But that required knowing what she wanted to do.

The grumble from Sadie’s stomach indicated this particular spiral was sponsored by hunger. Dehydration, sleep deprivation, and an ill-timed alcoholic beverage wished they had that power. Only an eggplant parmesan sub could pull her back from the brink.

Josh’s kitchen, with its big farmhouse sink and old enameled oven, was similar to Stu’s, well-preserved and desirable among people who craved this rustic and throwback aesthetic.

These fixtures were probably here the last time Sadie visited this kitchen as a little girl.

Back then, the property was a small goat farm, but Stu wasn’t close to the owners.

Damn hippies , he called them, for the crime of owning a Volkswagen Beetle in addition to a pickup truck.

The open layout of the A-frame allowed her to wander past the kitchen.

She spied no evidence of video games in the house despite Josh’s past. His living room featured a limestone fireplace as the focal point, not some expansive glassy void of a television she expected a gamer to favor.

Perhaps the faded brown box of a 1970s edition of Yahtzee sitting on the kitchen table was more his speed in his post-techie life.

“Did Stu talk you into playing his favorite game?” she asked as she sat.

Josh’s face lit up as he poured a glug of olive oil into a sauté pan. “He loves to trash-talk, doesn’t he? As if he can control your dice with his hexes. It’s my favorite game, too.”

It was her second favorite. “The perfect combo of luck and skill,” she said, echoing her father’s sentiments.

Would she ever get to a place where she and her dad could enjoy a round of Yahtzee again?

Maybe Stu only wanted to play with Josh, someone who wouldn’t bring the whole room down with a fierce competitive streak like her.

“Exactly,” said Josh, as he dropped his diced vegetables into the shimmering oil. “That’s the spirit I tried to conjure when I started making video games. And I think I finally achieved it.”

Maybe that’s why he quit. Once you reached your apex it was time to get out of the game. Or maybe all game design was a hopeless endeavor in the face of something as perfect as Yahtzee. “What was that game?” she asked.

“A phone game,” he said. “Called Pinchy Boi .”

Shit. Her number one favorite game. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

Sadie pulled her phone from her pocket. The lock screen was a screencap from when she’d finally beaten the most difficult level on Pinchy Boi .

In this game that mashed up puzzles and dating simulation, a cute little crab grabbed shapes and put them onto its back in elaborate patterns, trying to woo crab mates.

The screenshot captured her pixelated crab’s most impressive towering pile of marine treasures.

That arrangement activated every possible bonus and combo, allowing her to romance the final crab in the game, the one her crab player truly desired with its little crustacean heart.

Beating that level was better than sex, better than getting that first clean shed on a loom she’d spent weeks dressing, better than the time she took Molly in Joshua Tree and danced all night.

Had Josh Thatcher given her that ?

Josh leaned over to see her phone and his eyebrows shot up, his mouth broke into that wide grin all the way to his back teeth.

He lingered there, close enough that she could easily pull him in by the shirt collar and land a kiss on that smiling mouth.

“You’re an old-school player. From before Bonzo bought it and changed the art. ”

“And ruined it,” she added quickly, before wishing she held back. She hadn’t meant to speak negatively of the game she loved so much. Josh backed up, and Sadie, missing that closeness, regretted her words even more.

“Ruined it,” he repeated. “They took out all the luck in the free-to-play model and made you buy your luck with microtransactions. It was out of my hands at that point, but it made stacks of cash.”

“And they made it so that only male and female crabs could pair up. I hated it.”

“I did, too.”

It felt strange to think she’d spent so much time on something he’d worked so hard on.

It was like learning he’d been sleeping under a blanket she made.

She played so much Pinchy Boi that she still dreamed about it.

As a completionist, she had romanced every single crab in the game.

They all had goofy little stories that went with them, like the dainty crab who wore lipstick and loved shiny shapes the most. Or the hardscrabble crab who was missing a claw and liked a little chaos in the design.

“I can’t believe you made that game. I’m not going to tell you how many hours I put into it.”

“You don’t have to. I know how hard that level was.”

She covered her face with her hands. Her ears were bright red again, but thankfully Josh didn’t know to pull her hair back. She wanted to thank him for that game, which had been a gift for a time, a way to calm a frazzled mind, but it felt odd to do that.

“Sorry Bonzo ruined it. That’s what happens when you sell out, I suppose. But at least there’s still Yahtzee. No one can ruin that,” he said.

Josh fetched some home-canned tomatoes from his pantry. The peek Sadie got into that shrine to abundance was tantalizing. She admired people whose cupboards were all mason jars of dried legumes and homemade jams and not boxes of flavored couscous and canned soups like hers.

In went the tomatoes. “Did I tell you I talked to PJ about Go Hog Wild? I’m confident they’re going to find the legal loophole we need to stop Zach.”

Zach? Josh hadn’t mentioned his hog-raising neighbor’s name. “Zach who?”

“Huber.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose. This was going to be so mortifying to explain. “I had one boyfriend in high school. Zach Huber.”

“No,” Josh said.

“I think it was my healthiest and most successful relationship. Little did I know he would grow up to send stray bullets and loose hogs onto other people’s property. Fuck him.”

“It’s a boneheaded business and he needs to be stopped. How on earth did the two of you get together?”

Sadie indulged Josh’s curiosity. “He and I were a pretty unlikely couple in high school, I will admit. I was a sullen goth, and—”

“Was?” interrupted Josh.

She blew a raspberry and continued talking.

“And he was someone who spent a lot of time in the woodshop and liked to hunt and fish with his dad. But we got along well when we sat next to each other in math class. He asked me to a dance out of the blue. I was happy to get out of the house, so it went from there.”

“That’s sweet,” Josh said.

“It was at first. Then it morphed into something a little more transactional. Whatever crushy feelings we had for each other faded, but I didn’t drive, and he was more than happy to take me anywhere I needed to be.” She paused. “And, well, he couldn’t suck his own dick, and I didn’t mind.”

Josh’s spoon clattered to the floor. This man was a butterfingers when flustered.

The blow jobs had been a small price to pay for access to his vehicle. Her father was an impossible driving teacher. He reached for the wheel, he couldn’t keep his calm, and he criticized even the smallest mistakes.

Come to think of it, she wasn’t the best student. Any criticism was met with a vehement rebuttal, and she might have bumped a curb or two just to piss him off. The first time they tried parallel parking between sawhorses in the driveway, she knocked one over, and he declared defeat.

The night he quit on her, she went on her own pumpkin patch rampage, the act she was trying to atone for now.

After that, they didn’t speak for months.

When things started to defrost, Stu offered to try parallel parking again.

Sadie snapped back that she didn’t need to learn how to drive because she was getting the fuck out of Pea Blossom and would live in a city where she didn’t need a car.

Stubborn as she was, she made good on that declaration and never bothered to learn to drive.

Perhaps not her wisest move to pick Los Angeles of all places, but she made do just fine between the bus system, rideshare apps, and good old ride bumming (not in exchange for blow jobs this time).

“How did it end?” Josh asked.

“We graduated,” Sadie said. “I went to college. He didn’t. We didn’t even have a big discussion. He drove me to the airport when I left for college, I gave him head one last time in the parking garage, and that was that. We both knew.”

“Poetic,” Josh said.

Maybe she’d never found anything as comfortable or as easy as that high school relationship with Zach. Maybe she needed to get back to that place of simple companionship instead of being a borderline hermit with a small sex toy collection.

“He moved on and got married pretty quickly after high school. To my elementary school nemesis. That’s a story for another day.”

Josh topped the Dutch oven with a lid. “There’s no day like today. The ratatouille is simmering. Shall I open a bottle of wine? Challenge you to a game of Yahtzee? I’m dying to hear about your elementary school nemesis.”