“Can we go check on the pumpkins?” Ethan asked when the truck had been unloaded and the equipment stored in the aluminum shed.

“Sure. Go tell your mom where you’re going.”

Ethan scampered off toward the house, running at full tilt while Paul took a seat on the tailgate of the truck to wait for him. The boy’s interest in the pumpkin patch amused Paul and again reminded him of himself when he’d driven his father crazy for weeks every autumn asking when it would be time to harvest.

“I can’t wait for Halloween,” Ethan said a few minutes later as they crossed the yard to the fields behind the retail store. Off to the far left, Alex and Jenny’s beautiful new colonial-style house was nearly ready for move-in, and not a moment too soon as far as Paul was concerned.

“What’re you going to be this year?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking about a Jedi warrior, but Mom said we might not be able to find a lightsaber on the island.”

“I have one in the attic.”

Ethan stopped short and looked up at him, agog. “You have a lightsaber?”

“Don’t say that like I’m a hundred years old or something. I’ll have you know that Star Wars belonged to my generation long before it belonged to yours.”

“Huh?”

Paul laughed at the face Ethan made at him. He was a cute kid with freckles from the summer sun, dark hair that fell over his brow and big blue eyes that never missed a thing. Ethan ran ahead of him into the field where the pumpkins were growing right on schedule. With a quick glance, Paul could see they were still a dark yellow, but well on their way to the deep orange they would become in a few short weeks.

“Not quite there yet,” he said. “But getting closer.”

“How can you tell?”

“Size and color, my friend. They tell the story. When they’re ready, they’ll be bigger and orange, not yellow.”

“That one there is orange.” Ethan pointed to the one orange pumpkin in a sea of yellow.

“Pick it up for your mom.”

“Maybe she’ll let me carve it.”

“Whatever you do, don’t carve it by yourself. That’s how kids end up at the clinic getting stitches.” Paul could speak from experience about that and had the scar across his left palm to prove it. He pointed it out to Ethan.

“Wow, you got that carving a pumpkin?”

With Ethan struggling under the weight of the pumpkin he’d picked up for his mom, they started walking back toward the house. “Yep. My dad told me to wait for him, but I was in too much of a rush and sliced my hand wide open. My parents totally freaked out because there’s no hospital out here.”

“Was your dad mad?”