The Pumpkin Show Proposition

The drizzle started around ten and never made up its mind to be anything worse, so I finished my loop with my cap soaked through at the brim and my sleeves stuck to my forearms, and by the time I parked the truck at the station I had that damp-wool smell coming off me that no amount of shower stuff ever fully kills. I have been a postal carrier for six years now, which is long enough to know every dog on Route 9 by name and short enough that I still count the days to retirement like I am forty years older than I am. I am twenty-nine. Six years of mail, six years of getting up at five thirty, and a dating history that fits on the back of one of the junk flyers I deliver.

There was the guy I dated for two months at twenty-three, Craig, who sorted bulk mail next to me and who I liked well enough but never managed to kiss first, so he kissed me and I stood there like a signpost and he got tired of it. There was a man from the hardware store who asked me out and then talked about his fantasy football league for ninety minutes at an Applebee's. There was a second date with a dental hygienist who was perfectly nice and who I never called back because calling people back felt like too much effort, which should have told me something about myself that I have declined to learn. Mostly it was first dates. First dates are easy. You show up, you smile, you tell the story about the raccoon that got into the mail truck two summers ago, and then you go home and never answer their text because the whole thing felt like homework you already turned in.

I mention all this because it explains what I was doing at the Mabel Creek County Fair that Friday night, standing in front of the pumpkin weigh-off with a funnel cake not yet purchased and a light rain misting down on the sawdust, trying to look as though I had somewhere better to be. My coworker Doreen had said, in the break room, that I ought to go, that I ought to put myself out there, that the fair was where people met people in this county, and I had said yes just to shut the conversation down, the way I do.

The pumpkins were lined up on pallets under the big tent, enormous warty things the size of satellite dishes, and a man with a clipper board was reading weights off a scale while a crowd in ponchos went ohhh at each number. And there, at the edge of the tarp, in a rain jacket with the hood down, was Shawn Kellerman, who I had not seen since he transferred out of community college, which was seven years ago now, and who was taller than I remembered and had a better haircut than the one he had at twenty-two.

I knew him instantly, is the thing, and not from any of our classes, because we did not actually share any. I knew him from Marta Rowe's twenty-second birthday party, from her parents' garage, where Shawn and I had both had too many wine coolers and ended up sitting on the same folding chair, which sounds impossible but was somehow managed, and he had kissed me, or I had kissed him, it was genuinely unclear, and it had lasted maybe four seconds and involved a lot of teeth and a fair amount of nose, and afterward we had both said hey and laughed and then never spoken again for seven years. I had thought about it more times than I would ever have admitted out loud.

He saw me before I could decide whether to duck behind a hay bale.

"Alma? Alma Weeks?" He came over, wiping his palm on his jacket before offering it, which I found very endearing and slightly sad. "I thought that was you. You still got the, uh, you still delivering mail?"

"Six years now!" I held up my wrist, which still had a faint watch tan line even in September. "You're selling, what is it, fertilizer?"

"Agricultural supply. Feed, seed, soil amendments, yes." He grinned. "Glamorous, I know."

"Very." And then, because the universe was waiting for the exact right moment to humiliate me, I heard my name called across the tent, and it was Brent. Brent, who worked in the county assessor's office, who I had gone on exactly one date with last spring, and who had spent that entire date explaining his protein regimen. He was walking toward me holding hands with a woman in a pink barn coat, and he had the look of a man about to perform a social interaction whether anyone wanted it or not.

"Alma Weeks! Small world, huh? This is Kristin, my girlfriend. Kristin, this is, we went on a date, remember that, babe, the place with the" and here he gestured vaguely at his own mouth, meaning the salmon, I guessed, or the protein regimen, and I felt my face go hot in a way the drizzle could not excuse.

And I do not know where it came from, some panic switch I did not know I had, but I heard myself say, "Brent, this is Shawn, my boyfriend. Shawn, Brent."

Shawn did not miss a beat. He put his arm around my shoulders, actually around them, warm through my damp jacket, and said, "Good to meet you, man. Sorry, we're kind of on our way to see the rest of the weigh-in," and the way he said it was so easy and so bored that Brent actually apologized to us for existing, and then he and Kristin went off toward the corn dog stand, and Shawn's arm stayed where it was for another few seconds before he took it back and said, "So. I'm your boyfriend now!"

"That was," I said, "I panicked. He talked about his protein shakes for a whole hour once and I cannot survive that again."

"An hour?"

"Sixty minutes. I counted."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, and then he bought me a funnel cake without asking, which is exactly the kind of thing a boyfriend would do, and we stood under the tent eave eating it out of the paper boat while the man with the clipper board announced a new county record of 2,038 pounds and the crowd applauded the pumpkin, genuinely applauded it, and neither of us said anything for a while, and it was not the bad kind of quiet.

It was Shawn who broke it, brushing powdered sugar off his jeans. "Can I confess something kind of embarrassing?"

"Please."

"That kiss at Marta's party. I have thought about it more than a person should probably think about a four-second kiss."

"Oh, thank God," I said, and then had to explain