Pumpkin Hollow Reunion

The call came in on a Tuesday, which is how these things always seem to happen, on the worst possible day. Mrs. Hannigan had been one of my clients for over a decade, ever since I took over the practice in Allenville. I'm Staci, by the way, forty-two years old, veterinarian, single, and the proud owner of a truck that smells like dog no matter what I do to it.

Her daughter, Maureen, called me herself. "Dr. Ruiz? Mom left a letter asking that you be the one to handle Patches. The goat, I mean. Not the estate stuff, the goat."

So that's how I ended up driving two hours upstate on a Saturday morning in October, goat trailer empty behind me, to the Hannigan Family Pumpkin Patch to collect a geriatric goat and, apparently, sit around while Maureen's lawyer sorted through paperwork.

I hadn't been out there in years. That's the part that hit me wrong in the chest when I turned onto the gravel drive. Wendell and I used to come out here every fall, back when we were together, back in our early thirties. We'd buy cider slushies and argue about which pumpkin had the best stem. He was very serious about stems. It was one of the many dumb things I loved about him.

We broke up eleven years ago. He wasn't ready, I was, and I ended it. No screaming, no thrown dishes. Just two adults on a porch in Ithaca saying well, I guess this is it. I've regretted how quiet it was more than the fact of it.

The place looked different and exactly the same. New paint on the barn, same crooked sign. The corn maze was half cut down for the season. A volunteer in a reflective vest waved me toward a field where I could park.

Maureen met me by the small barn. She's fifty-one, tall like her mother was, with her mother's same no-nonsense squint.

"Dr. Ruiz. God, thank you for coming all this way. Patches is in the back pen. The goat, obviously."

"Obviously," I said, and we both laughed, because Mrs. Hannigan would have loved that joke.

While I was getting Patches loaded, Maureen mentioned the workshop. "There's a man out in the back barn doing an inventory of Uncle Peter's stuff. The organ parts. He's some kind of specialist. Anyway, if you need coffee, he has a thermos the size of a fire extinguisher."

I didn't think anything of it until I pushed open the side door of the old workshop and the smell of sawdust and old varnish hit me, and there he was, kneeling among what looked like a hundred metal pipes laid out on moving blankets.

Wendell. Forty-four now, gray coming in at his temples, same big shoulders, same way of holding a pencil like it might escape.

I did the thing where you stand in a doorway and hope the floor opens up. He looked up first.

"Staci?"

"Hey, Wendell!"

He stood up too fast and knocked his elbow on a shelf, which honestly made it easier, because we both laughed at that instead of whatever our faces were doing.

"Maureen said some kind of specialist," I said. "She could have said your name."

"She didn't know my name, I don't think. I introduced myself as Wendell and she called me Wanda twice." He wiped his hand on his jeans and then seemed to realize that wasn't a handshake, and then we did the weird dance of almost-hug, almost-shake, and landed on a hug that lasted maybe a second too long to be polite.

"You look good," he said.

"So do you. Gray suits you."

"It came in early and stayed without asking. Like a bad tenant." He gestured at the pipes. "I'm salvaging Peter's stock. These are late nineteenth century, some of them. Your Mrs. Hannigan, her husband's aunt was married to a man who imported pipe organs. Peter kept the workshop going after."

"Uncle Peter. I remember him. He had the parrot."

"He did have the parrot. The parrot is dead, by the way, before you ask. I asked too."

I sat down on a hay bale because my knees were doing something unreliable. "So you're still doing organs."

"Twenty years of it now. Churches mostly. I've got a shop in Rochester. Restoration, new builds, tuning, the whole thing." He dug around in a canvas bag and came out with the thermos Maureen had promised. "Coffee? It's from the stand up front. It's terrible."

"Terrible coffee is traditional here," I said, and took the cup he poured me.

We sat on the hay bales with the pipes laid out in front of us like a metal choir, and we did the catching up thing, the awkward version first and then gradually the real version.

"Still practicing?" he asked.

"Still practicing. Same clinic, actually. I bought out Dr. Feld when he retired, so it's mine now. Ruiz Animal Hospital. I dropped the Feld off the sign and half my old clients were mad about it."

"They'll get over it. They always do." He sipped his coffee. "Married? Kids? You don't have to answer, I'm just, I'm asking like a person does."

"Nobody since, not seriously. There was a guy named Jacob for a while, an oral surgeon, very nice, allergic to fun. That ended about three years ago. No kids. You?"

"Nobody serious either. I did the dating apps for a year and it aged me like a barrel of wine gone wrong. I've got a dog now, though. A mutt named Tuba."

"You named your dog Tuba."

"He follows me to work. He sleeps under the big console while I'm assembling. It seemed honest."

I laughed and he looked pleased with himself, and it struck me that eleven years had happened and yet sitting there it felt like about four. That's a dangerous feeling and I knew it was a dangerous feeling and I sat there feeling it anyway.

"So how did you end up with this job?" I asked, nodding at the pipes.

"Maureen's brother found me through the Organ Historical Society. Peter's inventory was in a locker in Elmira and somebody recognized the name. Most of this stuff I can catalogue in a weekend and resell to builders. But there's a swell mechanism in the loft upstairs that I think Peter modified himself, and if it's what I think it is, it's worth real money to the right church. So they hired me for the weekend. I've got tomorrow too."

"So we're both stuck here all weekend."

"Stuck is a strong word for a barn full of antique organ pipes and good company," he said, and then immediately looked like he wanted to eat the sentence.

I let him off the hook. "You always did talk like a brochure when you were nervous."

"I am not nervous. I am cataloguing." He picked up a pipe and turned it over with enormous concentration. "This is a stopped flute, probably from the eighteen eighties."

"Wendell."

"Yes?"

"It's okay. We're allowed to be awkward. It's the law."

He put the pipe down. "I thought about you more than I meant to, over the years. That's all I'll say on a first morning. Or a first whatever this is."

"This is a Saturday in a barn."

"It's a Saturday in a barn," he agreed.

We worked after that, and I mean actually worked. He taught me how to tell a reed pipe from a flue pipe by the mouth shape, and I told him about the worst case I'd had that year, a golden retriever who ate an entire rosary and passed it intact, beads and all, over four days.

"Intact?" he said.

"Intact. I have a photo I could show you but our friendship hasn't earned that yet."

"Friendship," he repeated, like he was filing the word somewhere.

Around two o'clock Patches started screaming from the trailer, because Patches was particular, so I went out and moved the truck into the shade and gave him water. When I came back, Wendell had spread out a second blanket and was sorting a different section, and the light through the barn door had gone all amber and long.

"Hey, Staci? Maureen asked if I could stay through Sunday night instead of just the weekend. If you're here anyway..."

"I'm here through Sunday. Patches has a vet check Monday morning in Syracuse, so I'm overnighting at the motel in town." I sat back down on my bale. "The one with the vending machine."

"The Apple Tree Motel."

"You know it?"

"I've stayed there on every job in this county for ten years. Room fourteen has the good heater."

We were quiet for a minute, the good kind of quiet, the kind we used to be able to do in a car for an hour without either of us feeling a need to fill it. Then his phone buzzed on the workbench and he glanced at it and made a face.

"Everything okay?"

"It's my sister. She's saying something about Thanksgiving, I'll deal with it later." He put the phone face down. "So. Tomorrow. Are you a morning person still, or has the veterinary industry broken you?"

"Six a.m. surgeries. I'm up before the sun and I resent it."

"Then I'll see you at six thirty, and I'll have better coffee, because I'm stopping at the diner and not the stand."

"That's the nicest thing anyone's offered me in months, which says something sad about my months."

He laughed, a real one, head tipped back, and I caught myself memorizing it, and the sun went down behind the corn maze, and I still had one more day of this.

I drove to the motel with the windows down even though it was October, because my truck smelled like dog and because I needed air on my face. My friend Dev texted me around nine, while I was sitting on the bed in room fourteen listening to the heater do its one job.

Dev has known me since vet school and she has the tact of a fire alarm. The text said, "omg is that WENDELL you're with? Betsy saw you two at the pumpkin patch and said he's SO serious about someone, like lock-it-in serious, you better not get your hopes up again."

I stared at that for a good minute. Then I typed back, "what are you talking about, who's serious about someone." She sent a thumbs up, then, "Betsy heard it from her cousin who's in the organ society circle. Serious girlfriend. Like meeting the family serious. Watch yourself Stace."

I put the phone face down on the nightstand, which is a thing I learned from Wendell eleven years ago, which was its own small insult. Then I picked it back up and typed, "Betsy's cousin is not a source, Dev." She sent back a shrug emoji and a "just saying, guard your heart babe."

Guard my heart. I was forty-two years old and I had a goat in a trailer outside and a man in a barn and suddenly I was being told to guard my heart by a woman who once cried at a car dealership.

I didn't sleep great. That's the part I'll admit to. I lay there doing the math I shouldn't have been doing, which was: he said he thought about me more than he meant to, but people think about exes and still build whole lives elsewhere. He was forty-four. He had gray at his temples and a dog and a shop in Rochester and apparently a serious somebody. And I had driven two hours on a Tuesday phone call and let