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I’d said not yet. I’d meant it. I was finding out that “not yet” was a lot harder to live with than “no.”

The festival was a few days out, and the big pumpkin still needed its final coat. So we were in the shop at ten o’clock at night with the work lights on and the radio playing low, painting orange onto a thing the size of a small house. She’d been up and down the ladder a dozen times. She had paint on her elbows and her jeans and, somehow, the back of her neck.

I’d been trying not to think about the back of her neck for about two hours.

“I’m out of the two-inch brushes,” she said. “Are there more in the back?”

“Shelf by the lumber.”

She climbed down and went to the back of the shop. I went back to the seam I was working on. Then I heard the rustle of canvas.

“Not that one.”

It came out sharper than I meant it to. She stopped with her hand on the corner of the tarp, the one that covered the tall shape against the back wall.

“Sorry.” She let go of the canvas. “I thought it was the brush shelf.”

“It’s the next one over.”

She found the brushes and came back with a handful. She was smiling at me, the slow, curious kind.

“You have secrets,” she said.

“Everybody does.”

“Not like that one. That one’s taller than me.”

“Paint the pumpkin, Hazel.”

She laughed and climbed back up the ladder.

There were some things I wasn’t ready to show her yet. That one I’d been working on most nights after her light went out or while she was away in town running errands.

We painted. The radio played something slow, and she hummed along with it. I kept my eyes on my seam and my mind on anything but her, and I did a poor job of both.

When she came down for more paint, I was at the base, fixing a drip. She stopped beside me to load her brush.

“You missed a spot,” I said.

“Where?”

I pointed with the end of my brush. At her.

She looked down at herself. There was paint on her sleeves and her jeans and her boots, and a long smear across the front of her sweater where she’d leaned against a wet rib.

“I’m just saying,” I said. “There’s more paint on you than on the pumpkin.”

She looked up at me. Then, very deliberately, she flicked her brush.

A line of orange went straight across the front of my flannel.

I looked down at it. I looked back up at her. She’d put her free hand over her mouth, and her eyes were enormous, and she was trying very hard not to laugh.

“I’m sorry,” she said through her fingers. “That was supposed to be a tiny one.”

I dragged my thumb through the wet paint on the lid of the can. Then I reached out, and while she was still standing there with her hand over her mouth, I drew one slow orange line straight down the bridge of her nose.

She gasped. “You did not.”