“And a pie baking one,” Joel added.

I smiled at the boys, looked back at Brock, and suggested, “Maybe we should go in?”

“Yeah, and hopefully me and my boys can haul all this in without any of us getting a hernia,” Brock muttered.

Both his sons lost their battle with their humor and burst out laughing. Eyes to his boys, Brock jerked his chin toward his mother’s house and they started marching.

I fell in step beside Brock, following them, and heard him say under his breath, “Only I could find a woman who describes pies as ‘autumnal.’ ”

“Well, how would you describe maple buttermilk pie?” I asked.

“Babe, I’ve never had maple buttermilk pie but there are only three adjectives to describe any pie and those are bad, okay, and fuckin’ great.”

“Then it’s good you work in law enforcement and not as a food critic,” I muttered.

“Yeah, that’s good,” he muttered back and I could hear the smile in his voice.

I watched Rex walk up his grandmother’s front walk, cautiously carrying the bag with the boxed chocolate cake well away from one side of his body and the one with the cheesecake well away from the other lest they bump into his legs and get jostled. Then my eyes moved to Joel, who had two bags, each with two carefully stacked pies in holders, and he was also cautiously holding his arms away from his body. Then I looked down at Brock’s hands to see he had one bag with three carefully packed pies and another bag with two bottles of wine and a two liter of pop.

Then I considered the possibility that I might have gone overboard.

“Maybe I went overboard,” I murmured as we neared the front door.

“Baby, my calculations say, just with the pies, there are fifty-six pieces open to seventeen people. That’s more than three pieces of pie for each person. And that doesn’t even take into account the cake. I think ‘maybe’ should be deleted from that sentence even if it is Thanksgiving and we can all expect to lapse into a food coma in about three hours.”

Seeing as neither had free hands and they were treating their baked-goods-carrying responsibilities with paramount importance, neither Joel nor Rex braved knocking on the door, so Joel started shouting, “Grandma! Open up!”

At this, it hit me that Brock wasn’t wrong.

Then I found my mouth whispering, “I didn’t want to mess up.”

To which I heard Brock say softly, “Hey,” and I stopped watching Joel shout (with Rex now accompanying him) and looked up to Brock. His eyes moved over my face then captured mine before he leaned in deep, touched his mouth to mine, pulled back an inch, and murmured, “What am I gonna do with you?”