Page 39 of Let’s Give ‘Em Pumpkin to Talk About

Sadie’s heart skittered as the flood of excitement and nostalgia hit her.

When Miss Jayne sang her little welcome yodel to get everyone’s attention, Sadie could have sung along, so deep was that melody ingrained in her.

The icy rush of pure competition surged through her.

She looked at Josh, eyes narrowed. He started, perhaps shocked at her intensity, but he should have known.

She was raised this way. Her father had carried her on his back when she was too little to keep up with him, too little to control the hose he dragged around the garden.

She and her father had personality conflicts, sure, but he raised her to be knowledgeable and skilled about the things that mattered to him.

Things that bonded the two of them even in hard times.

Until recently, she had forgotten that. But she knew at this moment she was representing Fox Family Farm, and even if it seemed trivial, these pumpkins put food on the table and clothes on her back when she was a child, so they weren’t silly at all.

Miss Jayne’s assistants uncovered the first pumpkin and began rigging the nylon webbing around it so they could attach it to the scale and begin reading off the weights.

Sadie felt a tap on her shoulder. It was Grace, with Brutus, whose snarling prevented Grace from going in for a hug.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Sadie said.

Behind her were some other familiar faces. Nate from the farmers market, other members of the Growers Guild and their loved ones. Behind them were layers of spectators. People loved big fucking pumpkins, as a spectacle and as a way to celebrate autumn.

Josh and Sadie spotted PJ, who had helped find the legal loophole that spelled Go Hog Wild’s demise.

Sadie smiled and greeted them as sincerely as she could, but it was like she was doing it all underwater.

All she could think about were the numbers Miss Jayne was going to read off and record in her loopy handwriting on the dry-erase board behind the row of pumpkins.

Everyone grew silent when Josh’s pumpkin was uncovered. To the naked eye, it was obviously larger than all the previous pumpkins, earning some oohs and aahs from the crowd. It weighed 1,194 pounds. That was impressive.

Sadie was next. She did something people might call praying, not because she wanted to beat Josh specifically, though she did, but because she wanted to beat everyone.

She had fought for this chance to be the best. This pumpkin was her best. She was proud of how she’d tended it ever since she took over its care, and it represented so much: her roots, her commitment, her knowledge.

She felt jittery watching Miss Jayne’s assistants get her pumpkin hoisted into the air.

She wanted to yell at them to be careful with it.

It might as well have been her beating heart they were weighing.

Josh put his hand on her shoulder. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t need to.

All he’d done was support her, and he was doing it still, no matter the outcome. She knew that.

Her pumpkin weighed 1,198 pounds.

When Josh first met her, she was screaming and throwing underripe pumpkins into the woods. Here and now she let out another whoop, this one colored with triumph instead of anguish. She’d beaten Josh by four pounds. The weight of a half gallon of milk. She was on top of the world, untouchable.

For all of two minutes.

Until they got to the last pumpkin, the one grown by the garden program for schoolkids in Indianapolis. Their pumpkin outweighed Sadie’s by thirty pounds. As quickly as her heart rose, it sank again.

But only for a moment. The group of children, wearing matching orange T-shirts made specifically for this day, burst forward into the space between the crowd and the row of pumpkins.

They danced and pumped their arms and the crowd adored them, pushing their joy to stratospheric levels.

It took no time for that feeling to dance its way into Sadie’s soul.

Josh’s hand stayed on her shoulder as he cupped his other hand around his mouth to amplify his cheers for the kids, whose endless energy for celebrating and dancing was remarkable.

Then Josh pulled her close. “How does it feel to be a loser?” she asked him.

Josh’s lips grazed her ear as he answered, “I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything at all.”

“Funny. Neither do I,” Sadie said, before adding another cheerful whoop to the chorus.

As the noise died down, Miss Jayne handed a microphone to the leader of the school program, Andrea, whom Sadie and Josh had met at the guild meeting. She was crying happy tears.

“Thanks everyone for coming out today, especially the parents of our students who were so supportive of our efforts. We also want to thank the Growers Guild for the knowledge and guidance they provided, especially Stu Fox. The video calls he made with our class got the students to believe in themselves, and look what they did. We’ll be selling the seeds from this pumpkin to raise money for next year’s program, which starts in the spring and goes over the summer.

It’s free of charge for any kid in Indianapolis Public Schools who’s not afraid to pick a bug off a leaf or get some dirt on their hands. ”

Video calls with Stu Fox? Did Stu Fox know how to turn the camera on his phone toward his face? Was he aware it had a camera at all? Sadie needed to call her father and see what he was up to in Florida.

After the speech, the crowd thinned out.

Sadie made plans to catch up with Grace the next day.

Then she received her second-place ribbon.

Josh got his third-place, and they took photos to post to social media.

After that was the anticlimactic comedown, like taking down Halloween decorations or cleaning up from a party, where they had to load the pumpkins back into the truck and drive them back to Pea Blossom.

Josh was mostly quiet, and so was she, businesslike in their tasks.

Once they were on the road, Josh turned up the radio and sang his heart out.

If it bothered him at all that he lost, Sadie couldn’t tell.

She knew she wasn’t supposed to be bothered by losing to children, because the kids had obviously done great with the same expert advice she’d grown up with.

But if she was honest, it stung just a little.

“You got any dinner plans tonight?” Josh hollered over the noise of his tunes.

“Not currently,” Sadie said. “I should probably consider a vegetable after the fried cheese and the Dole Whip.”

“Perfect. Then I’m cooking for you.”

“What’s on the menu?”

“Are you willing to try the Sadie squash?”