Page 15 of Let’s Give ‘Em Pumpkin to Talk About

Eight

W hile Sadie spun her tale, Josh finished the ratatouille with his unorthodox additions of tarragon and Aleppo pepper, delighting in the fragrance and punch they added.

Then he assembled Sadie’s eggplant parm, with mozzarella bubbled and browned under the broiler.

By the time they finished eating, they were about two-thirds of the way through a bottle of Cabernet Franc.

Sadie was looking a little looser. Comfortable even?

She’d gone from perching on her seat to a proper slouch.

Her cheeks were flushed a little as she looked at him with slightly sleepy eyes.

If he wasn’t mistaken, she was staring at his mouth. He was definitely staring at hers.

“Quid pro quo,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I told you about my high school boyfriend, who was a very nice boy back then even though he once glued his hand to a bookcase and they had to call the fire department. Not to mention my greatest revenge saga. Now you have to tell me about some high school relationship of yours.”

This was not part of the deal. While it was charming to imagine Sadie at a high school dance wearing all black and swaying with a boy wearing his best belt buckle, Josh’s story was sadder than it was funny.

“I never had a girlfriend in high school.”

She cocked her head. “Really?”

“I’m good around people now, but that came with a lot of practice. In high school, I didn’t have a girlfriend so badly that I made a video game to try to remedy the problem.”

“Oof. Has that ever worked for anyone?”

“Can’t say for sure, but it didn’t work for me!

My friend Logan and I were total losers.

He liked art and I liked video games. Two stinky boys who hadn’t grown into our faces.

After a field trip to a planetarium, we overheard some girls we liked talking about how cool it would be to know the constellations and mythology. ”

“And you had to swoop in.”

Josh certainly knew how to repeat a pattern.

He was getting better at waiting for people to ask for help before jumping into action, but back then it was his only tool for feeling good about himself.

“Honestly, the game was clever. You were a seafarer being tossed around by the gods, and every time the skies cleared, you had to use the stars to figure out how to get home to your beloved.”

“But the girls didn’t like it?”

“Someone else in my class had the much smarter idea of bringing my crush and a six-pack out into a field at night to see the stars.”

“A tried-and-true method of getting laid in high school if ever I’ve heard one.”

He shrugged. “What can I say, I was a naive little nerd. But Logan and I put the game on the App Store, back in the days really low-budget games could hit it big. We made enough money to start our little game studio, which we called Odysseus.”

“So you didn’t go to college? I guess lots of you tech types are, what’s the word? Autodidacts.” She looked a little pleased with herself for pulling that vocabulary word out of the bag.

Yet another insecurity of his. He’d made enough money from his first game that he skipped college and got right to work on the second game. He was certain there was nothing he needed from the classes in a computer science major, but he did feel like he missed out on some of the other things.

First was the social aspect of it all—living in dorms, going to parties, being surrounded by a cohort of people roughly your own age.

Second, he missed a chance to understand things that weren’t already in his wheelhouse.

He didn’t know how to read a poem or what existentialism meant.

And while none of that stuff impeded his everyday life, he did feel out of the loop in certain situations, namely dealing with certain Silicon Valley types whose parents put them on a trajectory starting from their choice of posh preschool.

“No college. Yet. I suppose I could always give it a try.”

“You certainly could,” Sadie said. “There’s a lot to learn about in this world. So your first girlfriend came after high school?”

Josh closed his eyes and pressed his lips together. “Yes, I started dating during what would have been my college years.”

“Where were you living then?”

“Daly City, south of San Francisco. All I can say is that not dating in high school gave me kind of a late start, you know? I didn’t know how to read another person or communicate well.”

Sadie chuckled softly. “Oh boy.”

“God, this is so much worse than your story.”

Her eyebrows furrowed. “You don’t have to tell me.”

In for a penny. “I thought things were going great. We were spending a lot of time together. I met her family. But a few days before our first anniversary, she showed up at my apartment and told me that she’d been giving it thought, and that she didn’t love me, and she was quite sure she would never love me, so she was going to move on. ”

“Oh shit.”

That interjection saved him from the mortifying conclusion of the story. On their anniversary he was planning to float the idea of shopping for an engagement ring, thinking marriage was a foregone conclusion. He let the shame push the memory back into the confined place he usually kept it.

“So now we’re even. You should try a bite of my ratatouille,” he said, changing the subject.

“One bite.” She picked his spoon up out of the bowl before he could offer her a clean one, an act that surprised him in its intimacy, and scooped a bite into her mouth. She made the face of a baby tasting a lemon.

“Sorry,” she said when her face had returned to normal.

The puckered face was cute, he had to admit, but this relaxed one, the one across a table from him, cut into him like a freshly honed blade.

“But I can see how people who like squash would like it? You should style a bowl to post to Instagram, it’s quite photogenic. ”

“I did take notes so I can write the recipe up for the farmers market.”

Josh’s recipe cards were free with the purchase of his goods at the farmers market.

People who were intimidated by fresh produce were thankful for the ready inspiration.

So far he had recipes for his Turkish cuisine–inspired fried squash patties, an enchilada-style veggie-filled casserole, and PJ even shared their decadent chocolate zucchini bread recipe.

Maybe someday he’d write a cookbook. Once Squash 2.

0 had hit the stage and people wanted to know what to make with it.

He’d be more likely to hit that morning talk show circuit with a book than with a vegetable alone.

“Oh, let’s not mention the farmers market. I have to start foraging soon or my father’s regular customers are going to invade the land themselves, he’ll have me believe.”

“You must have passed some chanterelles on the way here,” Josh said. He knew Stu cared as much about foraging wild foods as he did about his giant pumpkins.

“I know,” she said, a pained expression dancing across her face. “I like foraging, even. I’ve lost my sense of motivation lately. It’s a weird adjustment to be back in Pea Blossom.”

Even if that were true for foraging and for whatever art she was planning, she had certainly poured effort into the pumpkin plant.

Josh had been trying not to disturb her in the patch, but he couldn’t help but notice she spent at least an hour with it each day, inspecting the leaves for damage, checking the angle of the stems, watering, and if he wasn’t mistaken, talking to it, too.

Maybe even singing to it. He wasn’t close enough to hear.

“Would you like some company while you forage? It might go faster if I came along.”

Sadie sat up straighter, poised to bolt. “Why are you always so nice to me?”

He shot his question back before he had time to think better of it. “Why are you suspicious of my niceness?”

They gazed at each other for a moment, across their mostly eaten food and mostly drunk wine. Of course, Josh knew why he was nice to Sadie. There was the easy excuse: Stu was her father, and Josh needed to stay in Stu’s good graces if he wanted to buy his land.

The deeper truth: he wanted her. He wanted to feel her hips under his palms, he wanted to feel her mouth on his.

And she just mentioned giving blow jobs.

How could he not imagine cradling her head in his hands as those pouty lips stretched around his cock?

He could be more direct and make a move, and maybe he should for once.

Or maybe it mattered too much and he didn’t want to play his hand too soon.

“To be fair,” Sadie said, “I’m suspicious of everyone. It’s why I keep to myself.”

“And I’m nice to everyone,” he said. She narrowed her eyes at him. “So do you want my help foraging or not?”

“No, I can handle it,” she said firmly. “Now, are you going to challenge me to a game of Yahtzee or not?”

Part of what made Yahtzee such a great game was that it had enough randomness that anyone could win a single round.

That’s what made it a good game for children to play with adults, unlike a more purely strategic game where adults had to dull their instincts not to crush a young opponent.

It was over multiple rounds that a pattern resolved, showing who had a keener understanding of how dice rolled.

With a second bottle of Cab Franc open, Josh figured he would be lucky to correctly count the pips on the dice by their second or third game.

Passing a Yahtzee cup back and forth presented lots of opportunities for touching. He took every single one he could. If he wasn’t mistaken, Sadie took a few for herself as well.

Sadie was a trash-talker, naturally. She chided him for taking too long to decide and told him he was going to regret every move he made. At the moment he wasn’t regretting anything.

Not even challenging her to this game that she was beating him at, by the narrowest of margins.

“You’re quite good,” she conceded.

He would take that hedged compliment all the way to the bank.

“You’re quite drunk,” he said.

She laughed as she sipped her wine, spilling the smallest rivulet down her chin. He had the biggest wish to lap it up himself, to invite her to stay the night, to take her by the hand up to his bedroom. But it wasn’t the time.

“It’s true,” she said. “This is the time to ask me about why I avoid Pea Blossom, when my inhibitions are compromised.”

Sometimes he worried he’d done too much by offering her a pumpkin when she could have gone back to LA. Still, she chose to stay and she probably had other things to work out here.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Josh asked.

“I’ve read so many books about emotionally immature parents.

That’s what I figured out my mother is. I bring up feelings in her that she can’t deal with, and vice versa.

Then there’s Stu. The reason I don’t drive is because he quit teaching me when I was sixteen and I destroyed all his pumpkins as revenge.

Now I have a whole complex about driving.

Him asking me back here? It means a lot to us both. ”

Josh nodded. “I was right next door and still he wanted you to come. Deep down I think he trusts you.”

“You said you haven’t beaten him yet?” she asked.

“At Yahtzee? Yes. At pumpkins? Not yet.”

“I mean, of course you haven’t. I’ve seen this with textiles.

People trying to replicate fabrics by true masters.

People will dissect this fucking genius artwork and then try to reverse engineer it.

But that’s not in the spirit of the whole thing.

The craftspeople aren’t always counting and measuring.

They’re using their own methods, which work better because they’ve been honed over generations.

But you probably don’t want to believe that. ”

Josh spilled the dice across the table. They yielded a jumbled mess, no one’s idea of a good roll. “I don’t think what I do is better than what your father does.”

“You must, at some level,” Sadie pushed, “because he taught you his way.”

Josh admired people who could trust their senses like Stu and Sadie could.

He simply wasn’t that person, and had to work his own way.

“He did teach me his way,” Josh said. “And I built on it to make my way. Not better, different.” He gathered all the dice back into the cup for a fresh roll, saving nothing.

“Certainly not better,” Sadie said, laughing. “Come back when you’ve won the weigh-off.”

“Big talk from someone who’s only won once.”

She dropped her mouth into an O. “What happened to being nice?”

His second roll, miraculously, was a Yahtzee, five threes. “Oh, I’m still nice. I gave you a pumpkin, I’m going to take down Go Hog Wild. What else do you need?”

“Ugh,” she said. “What I really need is a loom so I can find my artistic footing again.”

“I can help you with that, too,” Josh said. “If you can wait about two weeks. Yahtzee, by the way.”