Funk-N-Fiction

I love this pumpkin heart inspired story we get to share from Tere Michaels today!!
And in the comments, I’d love to hear what seasonal traditions you have!! Do you visit pumpkin patches or go to parties?

The Pumpkin Queen’s Heart
by Tere Michaels

Joe was different, Mary Alice knew this from the first moment they met. They were seven, on the playground. Joe was new, Mary Alice was the undisputed queen of the blacktop, and she would have to pass her queenly approval before anyone would play with him.

She had her own horse and lived in a mansion and a man in a black uniform drove her to school every day, in a big shiny car. People bowed down to Mary Alice.

Except Joe. He didn’t know. Or he didn’t care.

Mary Alice and her posse of girls sauntered over to Joe, who was standing near the slide, smiling as he watched the kids play. He smiled bigger when Mary Alice stopped her shiny black shoes a hair’s breadth away from his clunky work boots.

What seven-year-old wore work boots?

“I’m Joe!” he said, hand extended, like an adult shrunk down to four feet tall.

The girls behind her tittered at his weirdness.

Mary Alice should have thrown him a cold and devastating look before deeming him unworthy of recess friends but instead she found herself shaking his hand back. Which she never did, except when they were in church, and Father Feeney told them to share peace with each other.

“I’m Mary Alice,” she answered, suddenly distracted by his fiercely green eyes and giant grin.

“Well, I guess you’re my first friend!” He spoke in exclamation points, which Mary Alice didn’t care for in general. Joe looked around him as if marking the place in his memory. “And this is our special spot.”

She blinked as the giggles got louder.

“Special spot?”

“Yup!”

“We’re by the slide. Casey Carter threw up here after he ate too much licorice,” she said.

“Gross!” Joe didn’t stop smiling. “Glad he’s not my first friend!”

The bell rang and Mary Alice stayed rooted to the ground, her shiny shoes digging into the gravel and dirt. Someone murmured for her to come on but she ignored them.

“First friend, special spot,” Joe repeated to himself, and Mary Alice blinked until she found the power to move. “Special spots are important you know.”

“What a weirdo,” Gretchen Harlowe muttered as they walked to their classroom, Mary Alice as the head of the spear, the way it always was. She could hear Joe calling out hello to people in the hallway and they were calling hello back.

Her head felt stuffy and weird, and she had a feeling her life was never going to be the same.

**

Joe’s last name was Zedler and his mother worked as the new housekeeper for the local retirement home. He had five younger siblings, no father, and no sense of decorum, which Mary Alice had to look up in the dictionary. Poppa was not wrong about that. Joe was also kind and exuberant, and he didn’t care when he talked to someone who was not popular. He talked to everyone. The jocks, the brains, the student council, the art students. It didn’t matter. Joe just kept talking in exclamation points.

Talking to Mary Alice in exclamation points and question marks.


“Do you ever get lost in that big house?”

“Have you ever slept in the stable with your horse?”

“Do you ever get dirty?”

“What are you going to be for Halloween?”

Mary Alice continues to defy the expectations of her gaggle of girls—none of them friends, more a mostly silent echo chamber of people dying to be her—by answering his questions.

Yes, she had been lost in the house, most recently when her parents threw a giant party with low lights and noise and confusion.

She’d love to sleep in the stable with Rose, but her father and mother would never allow it and the staff would tattle on her anyway.

Dirty was gross and she tried not to get that way, even if sometimes she stared longingly at a mud puddle.

Halloween was for babies.

Mary Alice and Joe barely saw each other outside of school. Joe worked at his uncle’s garage after three, starting in fifth grade and continuing through high school. Mary Alice had piano and dance and charm school, where she learned the expectations of a woman “of her standing.” She’d fought against her parents’ desire for her to go to boarding school in Switzerland, insisting she would miss them too much.

They believed her. Joe told her she must be meant for the stage; she was such a good actress.

No one understood their friendship, not when they were small and not when they were seniors, close to the edge of adulthood and breathlessly waiting for what was next.

Excitement in the hallways was the answer to that question for everyone but Mary Alice and Joe.

“Work” was his answer when she asked what was next.

“Marriage,” was her answer to the same question.

Joe stopped talking in exclamation points and Mary Alice missed them.

“Halloween is for babies,” Mary Alice huffed, as she and Joe sat together in their special spot, eating apple slices. Her parents were away on a trip and Joe’s uncle didn’t need his help, so they had a spare bit of time to just be regular old teenagers. “And we aren’t babies.”

“Pish,” Joe said, a real smile on his face. He loved their stupid special spot, never caving to the pressure of Mary Alice’s eyerolls. It was sacret he said, and if anyone ever decided to pave over it, he’d chain himself to the slide to stop it.

“I’ll remember you fondly when they smush you with a backhoe,” Mary Alice would say, and Joe would bat his eyes in her direction.

“You DO have a heart!”

“No I don’t. Shut up.”

“This is our last Halloween before adulthood begins,” Joe pointed out, stealing the apple slice out of her hand. She wanted to protest until she realized he was taking the one with the brown spots and giving her a better piece. Her heart did something she pretended was gas.

“And?”

“And let’s dress up. Go to a party. Have fun!” It was the exclamation point that melted a tiny corner of her cold heart, the shine in Joe’s eyes that had gradually been leaching out since he realized his life path was never going to be anything but work and struggle.

And Mary Alice’s was going to be cold and sterile.

She huffed, threw a handful of leaves at him. “You’re ridiculous.”

“And you picked me for a best friend…says more about you than me,” was his response.

Her glare didn’t work on him. He just laughed.

“For added fun, you pick my costume…”

“No.” She cut that off quickly.

“Yes. And I’ll pick yours. Oh, and you can’t just buy it!”

“I’m rich, it’s what I do,” she enunciated dryly. Her gaggle of hangers-on would have nodded breathlessly. Joe just dumped a handful of leaves on her head.

“And I’m a hick with no money. So that means I’ll be wearin’ fancy and you’ll be in a sack!” He began to gather up their debris and stood up, brushing the dirt from his jeans.

“Ugh.” Mary Alice didn’t bother to argue with Joe’s “logic.” She also knew she was going to go along with whatever he asked.

**

The night of Cerano’s Halloween party—the place to be in their small town—Mary Alice met up with Joe in the parking lot of the abandoned coffee factory at the county limits. It was windy and cold, and Mary Alice was chock full of complaints as she got out of Rebeka’s car.

Rebeka’s boyfriend Roger bitched in the backseat, uncomfortable due to his size—and the football pads he was wearing—and the tininess of Rebeka’s car. Mary Alice gave him an imperious glare over her shoulder then watched as they took off, before Roger could even get into the front seat.

Idiots.

Joe was bouncing around next to his rusty pickup, gesturing towards the bed. “Your costume is in here!”

“If it’s a cow suit we both have to be in I will kill you and dump your body in the river,” she said, hands on her hips.

“Oh damn, that would have been perfect!” Joe dug into the back of his pickup and unveiled an enormous, skirted orange ballgown that shimmered in the moonlight and then a massive crown with matching emeralds.

Mary Alice’s jaw dropped.

“What the hell is that?!”

“Your costume! You can change in the truck.”

Every sarcastic, wounding, smart-assed comment she could have come up with died in her throat.

“Oh and I forgot one thing.” Wrestling with the crinoline under his arm, he reached again to pull out a sword.

A sword!

Mary Alice stuttered.

“You’re the Queen of the Pumpkins!” Joe wiggled the sword around.

“You’re insane.”

Joe shrugged.

“Where…how…what!?”

“My mom has this lady at the home, super nice but also super weird and she’s always talking about being the queen of the pumpkins and my mom’s all—sure Mrs. Madge but then she thought, hey, great costume. And so, we borrowed these!” Joe’s grin lit up his whole dumb face and suddenly Mary Alice’s breath caught in her throat.

At the same moment, Joe ducked his head shyly, a thing she’d never seen him be. “I uh…the first time we met, I told my mom you were queen of the school so queen of the pumpkins, our first Halloween doing something…”

Mary Alice could only make one sound. She said, “Oh.”

She changed in the cab of the truck, amazed by the weird giant dress that smelled like mothballs and dust and a weird spicy perfume. Joe was standing outside, back turned to give her privacy, bouncing on his toes.

Mary Alice felt a little bit faint as she tumbled out of the truck. “Hook me up,” she murmured, gaze on the ground as Joe’s cold fingers did up the back of her dress.

Then she turned around, hands wrapped around the crown tottering on her head and Joe exhaled.

“Fit to be a queen,” he whispered and Mary Alice, God help her, swooned.

It didn’t take Joe long to put his costume from Mary Alice on. She’d told him to dress down, old jeans and work boots, then handed over an old plaid jacket, stuffed with hay and a crappy hat she got from Goodwill.

“You’re a scarecrow,” she said, embarrassed by the way things turned out. Because it was a reminder that Joe worked in the fields and Mary Alice ruled the land.

“I love it!” Joe said, of course.

Of course.

Joe drove towards the party but at the turnoff, Mary Alice took a huge suck in of air and said, “Keep driving.”

Joe drove and drove out of the county and down the quiet dark backroads. The heater on the old truck rattled and Mary Alice shivered as Joe took her hand.

“Can I show you something?” he whispered, and Mary Alice nodded.

He finally circled back around, to the empty lot behind his uncle’s garage. Joe never let go of her hand as he led her out of the truck and through the brush. At the edge of the clearing, he paused near a lump on the ground before shining a penlight he pulled from his pocket.

A heart made from three pumpkins, arranged in a circle of grass still strangely green.

“Mrs. Madge said it was something to do to honor the great pumpkin queen,” he whispered.

“I’m not a queen,” Mary Alice said back but her gaze never left the bumpy awkward heart.

“You’re mine.”

Mary Alice’s body flooded with warmth as she tipped her head to look at Joe’s open and loving face.

They never did make it to the party.

**

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair!”

Mary Alice tossed the sheets into the hamper with a sigh then walked over to the window. Joe stood, leaning against his rake, an enormous smile on his face.

Of course.

She struggled with the old window—old window, old house, everything creaked and stuck and let the wind in—opening enough to lean out.

“My hair is black. I think you might be at the wrong house,” she said dryly.

Joe tipped his head back and laughed, loud and joyous.

“I could get you a blond wig,” he called, wiggling his eyebrows.

“No thank you, the last time you did that we ended up with the twins nine months later.”

“What can I tell you, my queen. I can’t resist you on Halloween.”

“And Easter. And Christmas. And Thanksgiving. And Thursdays!” Mary Alice yelled as she pulled back in and shut the window. A hunk of plaster fell from the ceiling onto the floor in a dusty shower.

She could still hear Joe’s laughter.

**

“My queen!”

“Oh my God Joe! This is a hospital, shhhh!” Joe lay on the bed, covered in blankets, hooked up to all manner of machines that scared Mary Alice to death. Everyone was smiling politely at her in the ward, but none of those smiles reached their eyes. They’d been here before, fifteen years ago, and now, back again. This time, Mary Alice feared, it would be the last time.

“Where are the kids?”

“At the house. The children needed to be fed and put to bed.” Mary Alice took her coat off, sitting down in the chair at Joe’s side. Purse and gloves in her lap, feet together, just like Momma taught her. Head held high, calm and collected. While inside she was a mess.

“Tomorrow’s Halloween. I want everyone in here in costumes!”

“Joe…”

He wagged a finger at her. “You too, missy.”

“Absolutely…”

Joe coughed dramatically into his fist.

Mary Alice rolled her eyes. “Clearly you were the one destined for the stage.”

He rubbed his hands together like a little kid, cackling. She could never say no to him.

**

Mary Alice woke up the next morning, feeling well-rested for the first time in months since this latest thing with Joe’s health cropped up. Already she could hear their children, their children’s spouses, and the double digits of grandchildren up and creating a tsunami of noise. Every one of them had inherited Joe’s exclamation points, sentimentality and love of laughter. None of them was cool, logical or calculatingly royal. Joe said he preferred it that way—there was only one queen in his life, in this household.

Wrapping herself in her robe, she walked to the window and looked outside. Fall and winter were fighting for dominance, frost on fallen leaves. They’d fallen in love on Halloween, married on the same date a year later—just the two of them, in a judge’s chamber—and then embarked on their lives together. Disowned by her parents and shunned by her followers because how could she marry…Joe!? She felt sorry for them because she knew that’s never open themselves up to having someone like him in their lives.

Halloween became their holiday, with costumes and parties and insane displays on their property. Christmas was lowkey in comparison and they had Chinese food on Thanksgiving.

And every year, Mary Alice would squeeze into the pumpkin queen’s dress and crown, and wave that sword around to Joe’s everlasting delight.

It’d been a while; her body wasn’t the same as when she was seventeen. Or twenty-five. Once she hit forty, Mary Alice retired the dress to the attic. It wasn’t proper, for a woman of her age!

Something caught her eye down below; three pumpkins, arranged in a heart, in the spot where Joe frequently stood, shouting up to her, her plaid-coated Romeo, her loyal subject and partner.

Mary Alice pretended it was allergies to make her eyes water.

The noise from the kitchen was so loud that the windows were shaking. Mary Alice lifted her head, the wrinkles falling away as she walked down the stairs. It still smelled like age and spice, but Mary Alice took comfort in it. And it still fit her like a glove.

“Grandma!” shrieked Johannah, the youngest of their grandchildren and most like her namesake in volume.

The noise turned to exclamations of delight and praise. “Not Grandma,” Mary Alice said, reaching the bottom of the staircase. “Queen of the Pumpkins. Who’s coming with me to visit my heart?”