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NIKKI

The first pumpkin of the season goes on top of the stack at seven in the morning. I set it there myself.

It’s a good one. Deep orange, a stem with a curl in it, a shape that leans a little to the left so it looks like it’s about to tell you something. I found it at the bottom of the delivery crate an hour ago and knew it was going up front where everyone could see.

Punkin’s opens for leaf season in two days, and a pop-up café lives or dies on its stack. I’m going to have the best one on Prospect Street if it takes me until Thursday.

Behind me, the strip is waking up. Hay bales at every lamppost, cornstalk bundles roped to the posts. Mums crowd the shop steps, rust and gold. String lights loop over the street, dark for now, waiting on dusk. Up past the rooflines, the aspens have started to turn—a thin gold seam climbing both sides of the valley—and the whole town smells of woodsmoke even though it’s September.

I love it here. I love it so much I could burst. I’ve learned to dial it down before it shows, because a woman who loves things out loud makes people back up a step.

My phone buzzes on the counter. It’s a text from Mom.

Big day? Don’t forget to thank Aunt Carol for the loan. And honey—we should talk about a backup plan. The pumpkin thing is sweet, but you can’t do sweet forever.

I set the phone face-down and go back to my stack. Sweet. I have a business degree, eleven hundred dollars in equipment, and a recipe for mulled cider that made a food blogger cry into her scarf last October. But my own mother files me under sweet.

You learn to ignore the hurtful words. You learn to smile and build your stack anyway.

I step back to check the stack against the rest of it. The canopy’s up, forty square feet of white canvas staked into gravel, my plank counter run along the front and the cider kettle squatting behind it, cold for two more days. Hay bales for a threshold. No walls, no door, just canvas and open air and a hand-painted PUNKIN’S board roped to the front pole. It isn’t much, but it’s mine down to the last nail.

I’m three pumpkins deep and halfway through a hum when a diesel engine turns onto the strip and doesn’t keep going. It stops. Right in front of my lot.

I straighten. A truck the color of dried mud, a chipper hitched to the trailer behind it, BARLOW TREE & TIMBER stenciled on the door in letters that have worked a few seasons. Two guys spill out of the cab and start hauling gear. A third stays by the truck, head tipped back, looking up.

I follow his eyes to the dead pine.

Fine. Yes. There’s a dead ponderosa at the back corner of my lot—a big one, needles gone red-brown, leaning toward the boardwalk at an angle I’ve been refusing to think about all summer. I knew it had to come down. I did not know it had to come down today, forty feet from my pumpkins, on the one morning I cannot spare.

“Morning,” I call, wiping my hands on my apron as I cross the gravel. “You must be my tree guys. I’m Nikki. This is Punkin’s, which does not officially exist until Thursday but unofficially has hot cider right now if you want some.”

The two younger ones look over and grin. The third doesn’t.

He’s still reading the pine. Big through the shoulders, flannel sleeves shoved to the elbow. A beard with some copper in it, sawdust already worked into the knees of his jeans though I’d bet he’s been awake ninety minutes. A chainsaw hangs from one hand, one-handed and easy, and he doesn’t seem to feel the weight of it.

“That your stand?” he says. To the pine, apparently.

“Café,” I say. “Pop-up café. Two days from now it’s the coziest forty square feet in this valley.”

He looks at the tree one more second. Then he looks at me, full on, and something rushes down my spine before I’ve decided a single thing about him.

“Comes down toward the ditch,” he says. “You’ll want your pumpkins out of the drop zone by nine.”

That’s the whole sentence. No hi, no name. He turns back to the trailer.

I know this guy. Different face, same channel. The kind who takes four seconds to dismiss me as decoration and get on with his day. Half the vendors on this strip did it when I signed my lease. My own mother did it eleven minutes ago.

So I do what I do. I get louder. Sweeter. I make myself impossible to dismiss.

“Nine. Got it.” I’m already moving pumpkins. “You want that cider before or after you drop a very large tree on my livelihood? And I’m warning you, it’s real cider. I press it myself. People weep.”

One of the young guys laughs. “Wade doesn’t even drink coffee. Good luck.”

“It’s not coffee. It’s cider. Wade?”

He never gave me that name. His guy did. I use it anyway, just to see if it’ll turn him around.